1 

1   UNIVERSITY  OF  CALIFORNIA 

1 

AT   LOS  ANGELES 

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1 

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V 


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Two  hundred  and  twenty-four  copies  printed 
in  the  month  of  March,  1897. 

This  is  No.  /^% 


LECTURES 

ON 


ENGLISH   POETS 


BY 

JAMES  RUSSELL  LOWELL 


"  —  CALL   UP  HIM   WHO   LEFT   HALF-TOLD 
THK   STORY  OF   CAMBUSCAN   BOLD," 


^ 


CLEVELAND 

THE  ROWFANT   CLUB 

MDCCCXCVII 


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Copyriglit,  1897, 
By  The  Rowfant  Club. 


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Introduction 
Lecture  I 
Lecture  II 
Lecture  III 
Lecture  IV 
Lecture  V 
Lecture  VI 
g  Lecture  VII 
3   Lecture  VIII 

X 

g    Lecture     IX 

'•^    Lecture      X 

Lecture     XI 

Lecture   XII 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

vii 

Definitions, 3 

Piers  Ploughman's  Vision,  .  23 
The  Metrical  Romances,  .  .  .39 
The  Ballads,        ....        59 

Chaucer, 79 

Spenser, 97 

Milton, 117 

Butler, 135 

Pope, 149 

Poetic  Diction,    ....      167 

Wordsworth 183 

The  Function  of  the  Poet,      .      199 


\ 


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:  e'  U*JO 


INTRODUCTION 

jHILST  midway  in  his  thirty-fifth  year 
Lowell  was  appointed  to  deliver  a  course 
of  lectures  before  the  Institute  founded 
by  a  relative,  and  bearing  the  family  name.  He 
was  then  known  as  the  author  of  two  volumes  of 
poems  besides  the  biting  "  Fable  for  Critics  "  and 
the  tender  "  Vision  of  Sir  Launfal,"  and  the  nimbus 
was  still  brightly  shining  around  the  head  of  him 
who  had  created  the  tuneful  "  Hosea  Biglow"  and 
the  erudite  "Parson  Wilbur."  It  was  not  the  ac- 
cident of  relationship  that  procured  this  appoint- 
ment; he  had  fairly  earned  the  honor  by  his 
scholarly  acquirements  and  poetly  achievements. 
When  the  twelfth  and  last  lecture  had  been  de- 
livered, the  correspondent  of  the  "New  York 
Evening  Post"  wrote: 

"Mr.  Lowell  has  completed  his  course  of  lectures 
on    English  Poetry,   which    have    been    attended 

vii 


INTRODUCTION 

thi'ouglioiit  by  crowded  audiences  of  the  highest 
intelligence.  The  verdict  of  his  hearers  has  been  a 
unanimous  one  of  approval  and  delight.  Certainly 
no  course  of  literary  lectures  has  ever  been  deliv- 
ered here  so  overflowing  with  vigorous,  serious 
thought,  with  sound  criticism,  noble,  manly  senti- 
ments, and  genuine  poetry.  Mr.  Lowell  is  a  poet, 
and  how  could  a  true  poet  speak  otherwise  ? 

"  His  appointment  to  the  Professorship  of  Belles 
Lettres  in  Harvard  College,  made  vacant  by  the 
resignation  of  Longfellow,  is  the  very  best  that 
could  have  been  made,  and  gives  high  satisfaction. 
It  is  such  names  that  are  a  tower  of  strength  and 
a  crown  of  glory  to  our  Alma  Mater.  Everett, 
Sparks,  Ticknor,  Longfellow,  Agassiz,  Peirce,  are 
known  in  their  respective  departments  wherever 
science  and  polite  letters  have  a  foothold,  and  the 
nomination  of  James  Russell  Lowell  as  the  asso- 
ciate and  successor  of  such  men  is  the  most  '  fit  to 
be  made.' " 

A  quarter  of  a  century  after  their  delivery,  one 
who  heard  them  bore  this  testimony :  "  The  lec- 
tures made  a  deep  impression  upon  cultivated 
auditors,  and  full  reports  of  them  were  printed  in 
the  Boston  '  Advertiser.'  Their  success  was  due 
to  their  intrinsic  merits.  The  popular  lecturer  is 
often   led  to  imitate  the  vehement  action  of  the 

viii 


INTRODUCTION 

stump-speaker  and  the  drollery  of  the  comedian 
by  turns.  Mr.  Lowell's  pronunciation  is  clear 
and  precise,  and  the  modulations  of  his  voice  un- 
studied and  agreeable,  but  he  seldom  if  ever  raised 
a  hand  for  gesticulation,  and  his  voice  was  kept  in 
its  natural  comj^ass.  He  read  like  one  who  had 
something  of  importance  to  utter,  and  the  just  em- 
phasis was  felt  in  the  penetrating  tone.  There 
were  no  oratorical  climaxes,  and  no  pitfalls  set  for 
applause.  But  the  weighty  thoughts,  the  earnest 
feeling,  and  the  brilliant  poetical  images  gave  to 
every  discourse  an  indescribable  charm.  The 
younger  portion  of  the  audience,  especially,  en- 
joyed a  feast  for  which  all  the  study  of  their  lives 
had  been  a  preparation." 

The  same  auditor,  writing  after  Lowell's  death, 
mentions  them  again :  "  In  1854  [it  was  really 
1855]  Lowell  delivered  a  course  of  twelve  lectures 
on  the  British  Poets  at  the  Lowell  Institute.  They 
were  not  printed  at  the  time,  except,  partially,  in 
newspaper  reports,  but  doubtless  many  of  their 
ideas  were  absorbed  in  the  published  essays.  In 
these  lectures  the  qualities  of  his  prose  style  began 
to  be  manifested.  It  was  felt  by  every  hearer  to 
be  the  prose  of  a  poet,  as  it  teemed  with  original 
images,  fortunate  epithets,  and  artistically  wrought 
allusions,  and  had  a  movement  and  music  all  its 


INTRODUCTION 

own.  A  few  friends  from  Cambridge  attended  these 
lectures,  walking  into  the  city,  and  more  than  once 
through  deep  snow.  The  lecturer  humorously  ac- 
knowledged his  indebtedness  to  them,  saying  that 
wdien  he  saw  their  faces  he  was  in  the  presence  of 
his  literary  conscience.  These  lectures  have  not 
been  published  as  yet,  and  may  not  be." 

Even  while  they  were  yet  ringing  in  the  ears  of 
those  delighted  audiences,  Ticknor  and  Fields  were 
eager  to  publish  them,  but  Lowell  withheld  consent. 
The  lectures  had  been  rapidly  written,  and  needed 
the  labor  of  the  file,  and  this  the  unexpected  duties 
of  the  equally  unexpected  professorship  precluded. 
There  were  five  applicants  for  the  chair  vacated  by 
Longfellow,  but  Lowell  was  not  one  of  them ;  both 
his  nomination  and  his  appointment  were  made 
without  his  knowledge.  He  accepted  the  chair  with 
the  understanding  that  he  should  be  allowed  to 
spend  one  year  abroad  for  some  necessary  study  in 
Germany  and  Spain.  Then  his  professorial  duties 
engaged  him  and  the  "  Lectures  on  English  Poets  " 
were  left  as  a  waif  stranded  on  the  forgotten  col- 
umns of  a  newspaper.  When  at  length  the  oppor- 
tunity of  leisure  came  Lowell  found  himself  capable 


INTRODUCTION 

of  better  things,  and  he  was  satisfied  with  absorbing 
into  later  essays  some  fragments  of  the  early  lec- 
tures. There  ended  his  concern  for  them ;  but  an 
enthusiastic  hearer  had  preserved  the  Boston  "Ad- 
vertiser's "  reports  of  them  in  a  special  scrap-book, 
which  ultimately  became  the  property  of  the  Uni- 
versity of  Michigan  and  thus  fell  into  the  editor's 
hands,  who  felt  the  charm  thereof,  and  was  desir- 
ous of  sharing  his  pleasure  with  the  Roivfant  Club. 

There  is  little  doubt  that  Lowell  had  been  too  fas- 
tidious when  he  wrote  to  James  T.  Fields,  in  May, 
1855 :  "  It  has  just  got  through  my  skull,  and  made 
a  dint  into  my  sensorium,  that  you  wrote  me  a  note, 
ever  so  long  ago,  about  my  lectures  and  the  publica- 
tion of  them.  I  don't  mean  to  print  them  yet  — 
nor  ever  till  they  are  better  —  but,  at  any  rate,  I  con- 
sider myself  one  of  your  flock,  though  not,  perhaps, 
as  lanigerous  as  some  of  them."  And  when  Lowell's 
literary  executor  wrote :  "  His  powers  of  critical  ap- 
preciation and  reflection  were  displayed  to  advan- 
tage in  these  lectures.  No  such  discourses  had  been 
heard  in  America.  They  added  greatly  to  his  repu- 
tation as  critic,  scholar,  and  poet,"  —  there  could  be 
no  hesitation  in  setting  aside  Lowell's  modest  self- 

xi 


INTRODUCTION 

depreciation.  After  the  delivery  of  his  first  lecture, 
he  had  written  to  his  friend  Stillman:  "  So  far  as  the 
public  are  concerned,  I  have  succeeded."  And  his 
words  are  as  true  in  1896  as  they  were  in  1855 ;  and 
although  his  literary  art  was  not  so  consummate  as 
it  became  in  his  ultimate  development,  these  early 
lectures  will  aid  and  encourage  the  student  by  show- 
ing his  growth :  we  see  the  rivulet  become  the  flow- 
ing river. 

We  share,  too,  in  the  delight  of  his  first  audience 
on  reading : 

"The  lines  of  Dante  seem  to  answer  his  every 
mood :  sometimes  they  have  the  compressed  implac- 
ability of  his  lips,  sometimes  they  ring  like  an  angry 
gauntlet  thrown  down  in  defiance,  and  sometimes 
they  soften  or  tremble  as  if  that  stern  nature  would 
let  its  depth  of  pity  show  itself  only  in  a  quiver  of 
the  voice." 

"  So  in  '  Paradise  Lost '  not  only  is  there  the  pomp 
of  long  passages  that  move  with  the  stately  glitter 
of  Milton's  own  angelic  squadrons,  but  if  you  meet 
anywhere  a  single  verse,  that,  too,  is  obstinately 
epic,  and  you  recognize  it  by  its  march  as  certainly 
as  you  know  a  friend  by  his  walk." 

"Who  can  doubt  the  innate  charm  of  rhyme 
whose  eye  has  ever  been  delighted  by  the  visible 
consonance  of  a  tree  growiug  at  once  toward  an 


INTRODUCTION 

upward  and  a  downward  heaven,  on  the  edge  of  the 
unrippled  river;  or  as  the  kingfisher  flits  from  shore 
to  shore,  his  silent  echo  flies  under  him  and  com- 
pletes the  vanishing  couplet  in  the  \dsionary  world 
below." 

"  Every  desire  of  the  heart  finds  its  gratification 
in  the  poet  because  he  always  speaks  imaginatively 
and  satisfies  ideal  hungers." 

And  see,  too,  how  the  "  powers  of  critical  appre- 
ciation "  that  Professor  Norton  has  mentioned  were 
bursting  into  blossom  and  giving  promise  of  the 
golden  harvest  to  come: 

"  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  *  *  *  ^  jjja^jj 
who  gives  proof  of  more  imagination  than  any  other 
Englishman  except  Shakspeare." 

For  subtlety  and  depth  of  insight  Lowell  has 
never  excelled  this  early  example,  nor  has  he  ever 
outdone  the  critical  estimate,  so  true  and  so  terse, 
of  his  final  pronouncement  upon  Pope : 

"  Measured  by  any  high  standard  of  imagination, 
he  will  be  found  wanting ;  tried  by  any  test  of  wit, 
he  is  unrivaled." 

And  what  of  such  a  shining  felicity  as  where  he 
meets  Sir  Thomas  Browne  on  common  grouud  and 

xiii 


INTRODUCTION 

the  author  of  "  Eeligio  Medici "  gravely  smiles  and 
acknowledges  kinship : 

"  If  a  naturalist  showed  us  a  toad  we  should  feel 
indifferent,  but  if  he  told  us  that  it  had  been  found 
in  a  block  of  granite  we  should  instantly  look  with 
profound  interest  on  a  creature  that  perhaps  ate 
moths  in  Abel's  garden  or  hopped  out  of  the  path 
of  Lamech." 

Most  truly  "  No  such  lectures  had  been  heard  in 
America,"  and  as  truly  they  deserve  to  be  made 
more  than  a  delightful  memory  for  the  early 
hearers  alone. 

Lowell  wrote  to  a  friend  that  at  his  first  lecture 
he  had  held  his  audience  for  an  hour  and  a  quar- 
ter, but  the  reporter's  notes  of  that  lecture  fall  far 
short  of  that  fullness ;  nevertheless,  compared  with 
Anstey's  shorthand  notes  of  Carlyle's  lectures  on 
the  "  History  of  Literature,"  we  come  much  nearer 
to  the  living  voice  in  the  Boston  "  Advertiser's " 
reports  of  these  Lowell  lectures.  Carlyle  spoke 
without  a  written  text,  nor  had  he  any  notes  save  a 
few  bits  of  paper  which  in  his  hyper-nervousness  he 
twisted  out  of  all  hope  of  reportorial  decipherment — 
and  without  once  looking  at  them ;  Lowell  had  his 

xiv 


INTRODUCTION 

manuscripts  (written  currente  calamo,  for  the  new 
wine  of  life  was  in  full  ferment  and  it  was  no  small 
feat  to  bottle  any  of  it  successfully),  and  we  are  as- 
sured from  internal  evidence  that  the  "  Adver- 
tiser's" reporter  was  allowed  access  to  them.  His 
text  has  a  tang  as  characteristic  as  Thoreau's  wild 
apples,  and  we  do  not  feel  the  dubiety  of  the  blind 
patriarch,  "  The  voice  is  Jacob's,  but  the  hands  are 
Esau's."  No ;  it  is  James  Russell  Lowell,  his  voice, 
his  inimitable  mark,  and  these  are  his  words  sound- 
ing in  our  ears  after  half  a  century. 

The  only  attempt  at  "  editing  "  has  been  as  far  as 
possible  to  reproduce  the  reporter's  "  copy."  To  that 
end  Lowell's  profusion  of  capitals  is  retained  (and 
the  reader  will  bear  in  mind  that  the  Transcendental 
spirit  was  then  in  both  the  air  and  the  alphabet), 
and  even  his  italics,  suggested,  as  Mr.  Underwood 
says,  by  the  speaker's  emphasis,  find  their  respective 
places.  Here  and  there  a  compositor's  error  has 
been  corrected  and  a  proof-reader's  oversight  ad- 
justed; sometimes  this  has  been  conjectural,  and 
again  the  needful  change  was  obvious.  In  all  else, 
save  the  applause,  this  Rowfant  Book  may  be  called 
a  faint  echo  of  the  Lowell  Institute  Lectures. 

XV 


INTRODUCTION 

It  is  "  printed,  but  not  published"  in  loving  fealty 
to  Lowell's  memory,  and  every  Rowfanter  has  at 
heart  the  assurance  that  his  Shade  will  look  upon 
this  literary  Jiotsam  without  a  frown,  or  with  one 
that  will  soon  fade  into  forgiveness. 

S.  A.  J. 

Ann  Arbor,  November  10th,  1896. 


XVI 


LECTUKE    I 

DEFINITIONS 

{Tuesday  Evening,  January  9,  1855) 


MR.  LOWELL  began  by  expressing  his  sense  of 
the  responsibility  he  had  assumed  in  under- 
taking a  course  of  lectures  on  English  Poets.  Few 
men,  he  said,  had  in  them  twelve  hours  of  talk  that 
would  be  worth  hearing  on  any  subject;  but  on  a 
subject  like  poetry  no  person  could  hope  to  combine 
in  himself  the  qualities  that  would  enable  him  to 
do  justice  to  his  theme.  A  lecturer  on  science  has 
only  to  show  how  much  he  knows  —  the  lecturer 
on  Poetry  can  only  be  sure  how  much  he  feels. 

Almost  everybody  has  a  fixed  opinion  about  the 
merits  of  certain  poets  which  he  does  not  like  to 
have  disturbed.  There  are  no  fanaticisms  so  ardent 
as  those  of  Taste,  especially  in  this  country,  where 
we  are  so  accustomed  to  settle  everything  by  vote 
that  if  a  majority  should  decide  to  put  a  stop  to  the 
precession  of  the  Equinoxes  we  should  expect  to 
hear  no  more  of  that  interesting  ceremony. 

A  distinguished  woman  [Mrs.  Stowe]  who  has 
lately  published  a  volume  of  travels,  affirms  that  it 
is  as  easy  to  judge  of  painting  as  of  poetry  by  in- 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

stinct.  It  is  as  easy.  But  without  reverent  study 
of  their  works  uo  instinct  is  competent  to  judge 
of  the  masters  of  either  art. 

Yet  every  one  has  a  right  to  his  private  opinion, 
and  the  critic  should  deal  tenderly  with  illusions 
which  give  men  innocent  pleasure.  You  may 
sometime  see  japonicas  carved  out  of  turnips,  and 
if  a  near-sighted  friend  should  exclaim,  "What  a 
pretty  japonica  ! "  do  not  growl  "  Turnip  !  "  unless, 
on  discovering  his  mistake,  he  endeavors  to  prove 
that  the  imitation  is  as  good  as  the  real  flower. 

In  whatever  I  shall  say,  continued  Mr.  Lowell, 
I  shall,  at  least,  have  done  my  best  to  think  before 
I  speak,  making  no  attempt  to  say  anything  new, 
for  it  is  only  strange  things  and  not  new  ones  that 
come  by  effort.  In  looking  up  among  the  starry 
poets  I  have  no  hope  of  discovering  a  new  Kepler's 
law  —  one  must  leave  such  things  to  great  mathe- 
maticians like  Peirce.  I  shall  be  content  with  re- 
sol\T.ng  a  nebula  or  so,  and  bringing  to  notice  some 
rarer  shade  of  color  in  a  double  star.  In  our  day 
a  lecturer  can  hardly  hope  to  instruct.  The  press 
has  so  diffused  intelligence  that  everybody  has  just 
misinformation  enough  on  every  subject  to  make 
him  thoroughly  uncomfortable  at  the  misinforma- 
tion of  everybody  else. 

Mr.  Lowell  then  gave  a  brief  outline  of  his  course, 

4 


DEFINITIONS 

stating  that  this  first  lecture  would  indicate  his 
point  of  view,  and  treat  in  part  of  the  imaginative 
faculty. 

After  some  remarks  upon  Dr.  Johnson's  "Lives  ^- 
of  the  Poets,"  the  lecturer  proceeded:  Any  true 
criticism  of  poetry  must  start  from  the  axiom  that 
what  distinguishes  that  which  we  call  the  poetical  in 
anj^thing,  and  makes  it  so,  is  that  it  transcends  the 
understanding,  by  however  little  or  much,  and  is  \/ 
interpreted  by  the  intuitive  operation  of  some  quite 
other  faculty  of  the  mind.  It  is  precisely  the  some- 
thing-more of  feeling,  of  insight,  of  thought,  of  ex- 
pression which  for  the  moment  lulls  that  hunger 
for  the  superfluous  which  is  the  strongest  appetite 
we  have,  and  which  always  gives  the  lie  to  the 
proverb  that  enough  is  as  good  as  a  feast.  The 
boys  in  the  street  express  it  justly  when  they  define 
the  indefinable  merit  of  something  which  pleases 
them,  by  saying  it  is  a  touch  beyond  —  or  it  is  first- 
rate  and  a  half.  The  poetry  of  a  thing  is  this  touch 
beyond,  this  third  half  on  the  farther  side  of  first- 
rate. 

Dr.  Johnson  said  that  that  only  was  good  poetry 
out  of  which  good  prose  could  be  made.  But  poe- 
try cannot  be  translated  into  prose  at  all.  Its  con- 
densed meaning  may  be  paraphrased,  and  you  get 
the  sense  of  it,  but  lose  the  condensation  which  is 

1*  5 


'/ 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

a  part  of  its  essence.  If  on  Christmas  day  you 
should  give  your  son  a  half-eagle,  and  should  pres- 
ently take  it  back,  and  give  him  the  excellent  prose 
version  of  five  hundred  copper  cents,  the  boy  would 
doubtless  feel  that  the  translation  had  precisely 
the  same  meaning  in  tops,  balls,  and  gibraltars;  but 
the  feeling  of  infinite  riches  in  a  little  room,  of  be- 
ing able  to  carry  in  his  waistcoat  pocket  what  Dr. 
Johnson  would  have  called  the  potentiality  of  tops 
and  balls  and  gibraltars  beyond  the  dreams  of  avar- 
ice—  this  would  have  evaporated.  By  good  prose 
the  Doctor  meant  prose  that  was  sensible  and  had 
a  meaning.  But  he  forgot  his  own  theory  some- 
times when  he  thought  he  was  writing  poetry. 
How  would  he  contrive  to  make  any  kind  of  sense 
of  what  he  says  of  Shakspeare  ?  that 

Panting  Time  toiled  after  him  in  vain. 

The  difference  between  prose  and  poetry  is  one 
of  essence  and  not  one  of  accident.  AVhat  may  be 
called  the  negatively  poetical  exists  everywhere. 
The  life  of  almost  every  man,  however  prosaic  to 
himself,  is  full  of  these  dumb  melodies  to  his  neigh- 
bor. The  farmer  looks  from  the  hillside  and  sees 
the  tall  ship  lean  forward  with  its  desire  for  the 
ocean,  every  full-hearted  sail  yearning  seaward,  and 
takes  passage  with  her  fi-om  his  drudgery  to  the 

6 


DEFINITIONS 

beautiful  conjectured  land.  Meanwhile  he  himself 
has  Pegasus  yoked  to  his  plough  without  knowing 
it,  and  the  sailor,  looking  back,  sees  him  sowing  his 
field  with  the  gi-aceful  idyl  of  summer  and  harvest. 
Little  did  the  needle-woman  dream  that  she  was 
stitching  passion  and  pathos  into  her  weary  seam, 
till  Hood  came  and  found  them  there. 

The  poetical  element  may  find  expression  either 
in  prose  or  verse.  The  "  Undine  "  of  Fouque  is  poeti- 
cal, but  it  is  not  poetry.  A  prose  writer  may  have 
imagination  and  fancy  in  abundance  and  yet  not 
be  a  poet.  What  is  it,  then,  that  peculiarly  distin- 
guishes the  poet!  It  is  not  merely  a  sense  of  the 
beautiful,  but  so  much  keener  joy  in  the  sense  of  it 
(arising  from  a  greater  fineness  of  organization)  that 
the  emotion  must  s^>'^(/,  instead  of  only  spealdnfj  itself. 

The  first  great  distinction  of  poetry  is  fonu  or 
arrangement.  This  is  not  confined  to  poems  alone, 
but  is  found  involved  with  the  expression  of  the  po- 
etical in  all  the  Arts.  It  is  here  that  the  statue  bids 
good-bye  to  anatomy  and  passes  beyond  it  into  the 
region  of  beauty ;  that  the  painter  passes  out  of  the 
copyist  and  becomes  the  Artist. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  quoted  Spenser's  statement  of 
Plato's  doctrine: 

For  of  the  soul  the  body  form  doth  take, 
For  soul  is  form  and  doth  the  body  make. 

7 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

This  coordiuation  of  the  spirit  and  form  of  a 
poem  is  especially  remarkable  in  the  "  Divina  Corn- 
media"  of  Dante  and  the  "Paradise  Lost"  of  Mil- 
ton, and  that  not  only  in  the  general  structure,  but 
in  particular  parts.  The  lines  of  Dante  seem  to 
answer  his  every  mood :  sometimes  they  have  the 
compressed  implacability  of  his  lips,  sometimes  they 
ring  like  an  angry  gauntlet  thrown  down  in  de- 
fiance, and  sometimes  thev  soften  or  tremble  as  if 
that  stern  nature  would  let  its  depth  of  pity  show 
itself  only  in  a  quiver  of  the  voice;  but  always 
and  everywhere  there  is  subordination,  and  the 
pulse  of  the  measure  seems  to  keep  time  to  the  foot- 
fall of  the  poet  along  his  fated  path,  as  if  a  fate 
were  on  the  verses  too.  And  so  in  the  "  Paradise 
Lost "  not  only  is  there  the  pomp  of  long  passages 
that  move  with  the  stately  glitter  of  Milton's  own 
angelic  squadrons,  but  if  you  meet  anywhere  a 
single  verse,  that,  too,  is  obstinately  epic,  and  you 
recognize  it  by  its  march  as  certainly  as  you  know 
a  friend  by  his  walk. 

The  instinctive  sensitiveness  to  order  and  pro- 
portion, this  natural  incapability  of  the  formless 
and  vague,  seems  not  only  natural  to  the  highest 
poetic  genius,  but  to  be  essential  to  the  universality 
and  permanence  of  its  influence  over  the  minds  of 
men.    The  presence  of  it  makes  the  charm  of  Pope's 


DEFINITIONS 

"  Rape  of  the  Lock  "  perennial ;  its  absence  will  al- 
ways prevent  such  poems  as  the  "Faery  Queene," 
"  Hudibras,"  and  the  "  Excursion  "  (however  full  of 
beauty,  vivacity,  and  depth  of  thought)  from  being 
popular. 

Voltaire  has  said  that  epic  poems  were  discourses 
which  at  first  were  written  in  verse  only  because  it 
was  not  yet  the  custom  to  narrate  in  prose.  But 
instead  of  believing  that  verse  is  an  imperfect  and 
undeveloped  prose,  it  seems  much  more  reasonable 
to  conclude  it  the  very  consummation  and  fortunate 
blossom  of  speech,  as  the  flower  is  the  perfection 
towards  which  the  leaf  yearns  and  climbs,  and  in 
which  it  at  last  attains  to  fullness  of  beauty,  of 
honey,  of  perfume,  and  the  power  of  reproduction. 

There  is  some  organic  law  of  expression  which, 
as  it  must  have  dictated  the  first  formation  of  lan- 
guage, must  also  to  a  certain  extent  govern  and 
modulate  its  use.  That  there  is  such  a  law  a  com- 
mon drum-head  will  teach  us,  for  if  you  cover  it 
with  fine  sand  and  strike  it,  the  particles  will  ar- 
range themselves  in  a  certain  regular  order  in  sym- 
pathy with  its  vibrations.  So  it  is  well  known 
that  the  wood  of  a  violin  shows  an  equal  sensibility, 
and  an  old  instrument  is  better  than  a  new  one 
because  all  resistance  has  been  overcome.  I  have 
observed,  too,  as  something  that  distinguishes  sing- 

9 


y 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ing  birds  from  birds  of  prey,  that  their  flight  is 
made  up  of  a  series  of  parabolic  curves,  with  rests 
at  regular  intervals,  produced  by  a  momentary  fold- 
ing of  the  wings ;  as  if  the  law  of  their  being  were 
in  some  sort  metrical  and  thejjlew  musically. 

Who  can  doubt  the  innate  charm  of  rhyme  whose 
eye  has  ever  been  delighted  by  the  visible  conso- 
nance of  the  tree  growing  at  once  toward  an  up- 
ward and  a  downward  heaven  on  the  edge  of  an 
unrippled  river ;  or,  as  the  kingfisher  flits  from  shore 
to  shore,  his  silent  echo  flies  under  him  and  com- 
pletes the  vanishing  couplet  in  the  visionary  world 
below?  Who  can  question  the  divine  validity  of 
number,  proportion,  and  harmony,  who  has  studied 
the  various  rhythms  of  the  forest  ?  Look  for  ex- 
ample at  the  pine,  how  its  branches,  balancing  each 
other,  ray  out  from  the  tapering  stem  in  stanza  after 
stanza,  how  spray  answers  to  spray,  and  leaf  to  leaf 
in  ordered  strophe  and  antistrophe,  till  the  perfect 
tree  stands  an  embodied  ode,  through  which  the  un- 
thinking wind  cannot  wander  without  finding  the 
melody  that  is  in  it  and  passing  away  in  music. 

Language,  as  the  poets  use  it,  is  something  more 
than  an  expedient  for  conveying  thought.  If  mere 
meaning  were  all,  then  would  the  Dictionary  be  al- 
ways the  most  valuable  work  in  any  tongue,  for  in 
it  exist  potentially  all  eloquence,  ail  wisdom,  all 

10 


DEFINITIONS 

pathos,  and  all  wit.  It  is  a  great  wild  continent  of 
words  ready  to  be  tamed  and  subjugated,  to  have 
its  meanings  and  nses  applied.  The  prose  writer 
finds  there  his  quarry  and  his  timber ;  but  the  poet 
enters  it  like  Orpheus,  and  makes  its  wild  inmates 
sing  and  dance  and  keep  joyous  time  to  every 
wavering  fancy  of  his  lyre. 

All  language  is  dead  invention,  and  our  conver- 
sational currency  is  one  of  shells  like  that  of  some 
African  tribes — shells  in  which  poetic  thoughts  once 
housed  themselves,  and  colored  with  the  tints  of 
morning.  But  the  poet  can  give  back  to  them  their 
energy  and  freshness;  can  conjure  symbolic  powers 
out  of  the  carnal  and  the  trite.  For  it  is  only  an 
enchanted  sleep,  a  simulated  death,  that  benumbs 
language ;  and  see  how,  when  the  true  prince-poet 
comes,  the  arrested  blood  and  life  are  set  free  again 
by  the  touch  of  his  fiery  lips,  and  as  Beauty  awakens 
through  all  her  many-chambered  palace  runs  a  thrill 
as  of  creation,  giving  voice  and  motion  and  intelli- 
gence to  what  but  now  were  dumb  and  stiffened 
images. 

The  true  reception  of  whatever  is  poetical  or  im- 
aginative presupposes  a  more  exalted,  or,  at  least, 
excited,  condition  of  mind  both  in  the  poet  and  the 
reader.  To  take  an  example  from  daily  life,  look  at 
the  wholly  diverse  emotions  with  which  a  partizan 

11 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  an  indifferent  person  read  the  same  political 
newspaper.  The  one  thinks  the  editor  a  very  sound 
and  moderate  person  whose  opinion  is  worth  hav- 
ing on  a  practical  question ;  the  other  wonders  to 
see  one  very  respectable  citizen  drawn  as  a  Jupiter 
Touans,  with  as  near  an  approach  to  real  thunder- 
bolts as  printer's  ink  and  paper  will  concede,  and 
another,  equally  respectable  and  a  member  of  the 
same  church,  painted  entirely  black,  with  horns, 
hoofs,  and  tail.  The  partizan  is  in  the  receptive 
condition  just  spoken  of;  the  indifferent  occupies 
the  solid  ground  of  the  common  sense. 

To  illustrate  the  superiority  of  the  poetic  imagi- 
nation over  the  prosaic  understanding,  Mr.  Lowell 
quoted  a  story  told  by  Le  Grand  in  a  note  to  one  of 
his  "  Fabliaux."  A  sinner  lies  dying,  and  an  angel 
and  a  fiend,  after  disputing  the  right  to  his  soul, 
agree  to  settle  the  affair  by  a  throw  of  dice.  The 
fiend  gets  the  first  chance,  and  the  fatal  cubes  come 
up  —  two  sixes !  He  chuckles  and  rubs  his  claws, 
for  everybody  knows  that  no  higher  number  is  pos- 
sible. But  the  angel  thinks  otherwise,  throws,  and, 
behold,  a  six  and  seven  !  And  thus  it  is,  that  when 
the  understanding  has  done  its  best,  when  it  has 
reached,  as  it  thinks,  down  to  the  last  secret  of 
music  and  meaning  that  language  is  capable  of, 
the  poetical  sense  comes  in  with  its  careless  mir- 

12 


DEFINITIONS 

acle,  and  gets  one  more   point   than  there  are  in 
the  dice. 

Imagination  is  not  necessarily  concerned  with 
poetic  expression.  Nothing  can  be  more  poetical 
than  the  lines  of  Henry  More  the  Platonist : 

What  doth  move 
The  nightingale  to  sing  so  fresh  and  clear? 
The  thrush  or  lark,  that  mounting  high  above, 
Chants  her  shrill  notes  to  heedless  ears  of  corn, 
Heavily  hanging  in  the  dewy  morn. 

But  compare  it  with  Keats' 

Ruth,  when  sick  for  home, 
She  stood  in  tears  amid  the  alien  corn. 

The  imagination  has  touched  that  word  "alien," 
and  in  it  we  see  the  field  through  Ruth's  eyes,  as 
she  looked  round  on  the  hostile  spikes,  and  not 
through  those  of  the  poet. 

Imagination  enters  more  or  less  into  the  compo- 
sition of  all  great  minds,  all  minds  that  have  what 
we  call  breadth  as  distinguished  from  mere  force 
or  acuteness.  We  find  it  in  philosophers  like  Plato 
and  Bacon,  in  discoverers  like  Kepler  and  Newton, 
in  fanatics  like  George  Fox,  and  in  reformers  like 
Luther. 

The  shape  which  the  imaginative  faculty  will  take 

13 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

is  modified  by  the  force  of  the  other  qualities  with 
which  it  is  coordinated  in  the  mind.  If  the  moral 
sense  predominates,  the  man  becomes  a  reformer, 
or  a  fanatic,  and  his  imagination  gets  itself  uttered 
in  his  life.  Bunyan  would  have  been  nothing  but 
a  fanatic,  if  he  had  not  been  luckily  shut  up  in 
Bedford  jail,  alone  with  his  imagination,  which, 
unable  to  find  vent  in  any  other  way,  possessed 
and  tortured  him  till  it  had  wrung  the  "Pilgrim's 
Progress"  out  of  him  —  a  book  the  nearest  to  a 
poem,  without  being  one,  that  ever  was  written. 
Uniting  itself  with  the  sense  of  form,  Imagina- 
tion makes  a  sculptor;  with  those  of  form  and  color, 
a  painter ;  with  those  of  time  and  tune,  a  musician. 
For  in  itself  it  is  dumb,  and  can  find  expression 
only  through  the  help  of  some  other  faculty. 

Imagination  j9/i(.S'  the  poetic  sense  is  poesy,  minus 
the  poetic  sense  it  is  science,  though  it  may  clothe 
itself  in  verse.  To  those  who  are  familiar  with  Dr. 
Donne's  verses,  I  need  only  mention  his  name  as  a 
proof  of  my  last  position.  He  solves  problems  in 
rhyme,  that  is  all. 

Shakspeare  was  so  charged  with  the  highest 
form  of  the  poetic  imagination,  as  some  persons  are 
with  electricity,  that  he  could  not  point  his  finger 
at  a  word  without  a  spark  of  it  going  out  of  him. 
I  will  illustrate  it  by  an  example  taken  at  random 

14 


DEFINITIONS 

from  him.  When  Romeo  is  parting  from  Juliet, 
Shakspeare  first  projects  his  own  mind  into  Ro- 
meo, and  then,  as  Romeo  becomes  so  possessed  with 
the  emotion  of  the  moment  that  his  words  take 
color  from  it,  all  nature  is  infected  and  is  full  of 
partings.     He  says: 

But  look  what  envious  streaks 
Do  lace  the  severing  clouds. 

Shakspeare's  one  hundred  and  thirteenth  sonnet 
was  here  also  quoted  in  illustration. 

The  highest  form  of  imagination,  Mr.  Lowell  said,  , 
is  the  dramatic,  of  which  Shakspeare  must  always 
stand  for  the  only  definition.  Next  is  the  narra- 
tive imagination,  where  the  poet  forces  his  own 
personal  consciousness  upon  us  and  makes  our 
senses  the  slaves  of  his  own.  Of  this  kind  Dante's  ^ 
"Divina  Commedia"  is  the  type.  Below  this  are 
the  poems  in  which  the  imagination  is  more  dif- 
fused; where  the  impression  we  receive  is  rather 
from  mass  than  from  particulars ;  where  single  lines 
are  not  so  strong  in  themselves  as  in  forming  in- 
tegral portions  of  great  sweeps  of  verse;  where  ^ 
effects  are  produced  by  allusion  and  suggestion,  by 
sonorousness,  by  the  use  of  names  which  have  a 
traditional  poetic  value.  Of  this  kind  Milton  is 
the  type. 

15 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Lastly,  said  Mr.  Lowell,  I  would  place  in  a  class 
by  themselves  those  poets  who  have  properly  no 
imagination  at  all,  but  only  a  pictorial  power. 
These  we  may  call  the  imaginary  poets,  writers  who 
give  us  images  of  things  that  neither  they  nor  we 
believe  in  or  can  be  deceived  by,  like  pictures  from 
a  magic  lantern.  Of  this  kind  are  the  Oriental 
poems  of  Southey,  which  show  a  knowledge  of  Asi- 
atic mythologies,  but  are  not  liviugly  mythologic. 

Where  the  imagination  is  found  in  combination 
with  great  acuteness  of  intellect,  we  have  its  sec- 
ondary or  prose  form.  Lord  Bacon  is  an  example 
of  it.  Sir  Thomas  Browne  is  a  still  more  remarka- 
ble one  —  a  man  who  gives  proof  of  more  imagina- 
tion than  any  other  Englishman  except  Shakspeare. 

Fancy  is  a  frailer  quality  than  Imagination,  and 
cannot  breathe  the  difficult  air  of  the  higher  re- 
gions of  intuition.  In  combination  with  Sentiment 
it  produces  poetry;  with  Experience,  wit.  The 
poetical  faculty  is  in  closer  affinity  with  Imagina- 
tion ;  the  poetical  temperament  with  Fancy.  Con- 
trast Milton  with  Herrick  or  Moore.  In  illustra- 
tion Mr.  Lowell  quoted  from  Marvell,  the  poet  of  all 
others  whose  fancy  hints  always  at  something  be- 
yond itself,  and  whose  wit  seems  to  have  been  fed 
on  the  strong  meat  of  humor. 

As  regards  man,  Fancy  takes  delight  in  life,  man- 

16 


DEFINITIONS 

ners,  and  the  result  of  culture,  in  what  may  be 
called  Sceneri/ ;  Imagination  is  that  mysterious 
something  which  we  call  Nature  —  the  unf athomed 
base  on  which  Scenery  rests  and  is  sustained. 
Fancy  deals  with  feeling;  Imagination  with  pas- 
sion. I  have  sometimes  thought  that  Shakspeare,  in 
the  scene  of  the  "  Tempest,"  intended  to  typify  the 
isle  of  3Im?,  and  in  the  characters,  some  of  the  lead- 
ing qualities  or  passions  which  dwell  in  it.  It  is 
not  hard  to  find  the  Imagination  in  Prospero,  the 
Fancy  in  Ariel,  and  the  Understanding  in  Caliban ; 
and,  as  he  himself  was  the  poetic  imagination  in- 
carnated, is  it  considering  too  nicely  to  think  that 
there  is  a  profound  personal  allusion  in  the  break- 
ing of  Prospero's  wand  and  the  burying  of  his  book 
to  the  nature  of  that  man  who,  after  such  thauma- 
turgy,  could  go  down  to  Stratford  and  live  there 
for  years,  only  collecting  his  dividends  from  the 
Globe  Theatre,  lending  money  on  mortgage,  and 
leaning  over  the  gate  to  chat  and  chaffer  with  his 
neighbors  ? 

I  think  that  every  man  is  conscious  at  times  that 
it  is  only  his  borders,  his  seaboard,  that  is  civilized 
and  subdued.  Behind  that  narrow  strip  stretches 
the  untamed  domain,  shaggy,  unexplored,  of  the 
natural  instincts.  Is  not  this  so!  Then  we  can  nar- 
row our  definition  yet  farther,  and  say  that  Fancy 

2  17 


c. 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  Wit  appear  to  the  artificial  man ;  Imagination 
and  Humor  to  the  natural  man.  Thus  each  of  us 
in  his  dual  capacity  can  at  once  like  Chaucer  and 
Pope,  Butler  and  Jean  Paul,  and  bury  the  hatchet 
of  one  war  of  tastes. 

And  now,  finally,  what  is  the  secret  of  the  great 
poet's  power  over  us  ?  There  is  something  we  love 
better  than  love,  something  that  is  sweeter  to  us 
than  riches,  something  that  is  more  inspiring  to  us 
than  success — and  that  is  the  imagination  of  them. 
No  woman  was  ever  loved  enough,  no  miser  was 
ever  rich  enough,  no  ambitious  man  ever  success- 
ful enough,  but  in  imagination.  Every  desire  of 
the  heart  finds  its  gratification  in  the  poet  because 
he  speaks  always  imaginatively  and  satisfies  ideal 
hungers.  We  are  the  always-welcome  guests  of  his 
ennobling  words. 

This,  then,  is  why  the  poet  has  always  been  held 
in  reverence  among  men.  All  nature  is  dumb,  and 
we  men  have  mostly  but  a  stunted  and  stuttering 
speech.  But  the  longing  of  every  created  thing  is 
for  utterance  and  expression.  The  Poet's  office, 
whether  we  call  him  Seer,  Prophet,  Maker,  or 
Namer,  is  always  this — to  be  the  Voice  of  this  lower 
world.  Through  him,  man  and  nature  find  at  last 
a  tongue  by  which  they  can  utter  themselves  and 
speak  to  each  other.     The  beauties  of  the  visible 

18 


DEFINITIONS 

world,  the  trembliug  attractions  of  the  invisible, 
the  hopes  and  desires  of  the  heart,  the  aspirations 
of  the  sonl,  the  passions  and  the  charities  of  men ; 
nay,  the  trees,  the  rocks,  our  poor  old  speechless 
mother,  the  earth  herself,  become  voice  and  music, 
and  attain  to  that  humanity,  a  divine  instinct  of 
which  is  implanted  in  them  all. 


19 


LECTURE   II 

PIERS   PLOUaHMAN'S  VISION 

{Friday  Evening,  Jannart/ 12,  1855) 


II 


TN  literature,  as  in  religion  and  polities,  there  is 
a  class  of  men  who  may  be  called  Fore-runners. 
As  there  were  brave  men  before  Agamemnon,  so 
there  must  have  been  brave  poets  before  Homer. 
All  of  us,  the  great  as  well  as  the  little,  are  the  re- 
sult of  the  entire  Past.  It  is  but  just  that  we  should 
remember  now  and  then  that  the  very  dust  in  the 
beaten  highways  of  thought  is  that  of  perhaps 
nameless  saints  and  heroes  who  thought  and  suf- 
fered and  died  to  make  commonplace  practicable  to 
us.  Men  went  to  the  scaffold  or  the  stake  for  ideas 
and  principles  which  we  set  up  in  our  writings  and 
our  talk  as  thoughtlessly  as  a  printer  sticks  his 
type,  and  the  country  editor,  when  he  wrote  his  last 
diatribe  on  the  freedom  of  the  press,  dipped  his  pen 
without  knowing  it  in  the  blood  of  the  martyrs.  It 
would  be  well  for  us  to  remember,  now  and  then, 
our  dusty  benefactors,  and  to  be  conscious  that  we 
are  under  bonds  to  the  Present  to  the  precise 
amount  that  we  are  indebted  to  the  Past. 

Thus,  from  one  point  of  view,  there  is  nothing 

23 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

more  saddening  than  a  biographical  dictionary.  It 
is  Uke  a  graveyard  of  might-have-beens  and  used- 
to-be's,  of  fames  that  never  ripened  and  of  fames 
ah-eady  decayed.  Here  lies  the  great  Thinker  who 
stammered  and  could  not  find  the  best  word  for  his 
best  thought,  and  so  the  fame  went  to  some  other 
v^  who  had  the  gift  of  tongues.  Here  lies  the  gatherer 
of  great  masses  of  learning  from  which  another  was 
to  distil  the  essence,  and  to  get  his  name  upon  all 
the  phials  and  show-bills.  But  if  these  neglected 
headstones  preach  the  vanity  of  a  selfish  ambition, 
they  teach  also  the  better  lesson  that  every  man's 
activity  belongs  not  to  himself  but  to  his  kind, 
and  whether  he  will  or  not  must  serve  at  last  some 
other,  greater  man.  We  are  all  foot-soldiers,  and 
it  is  out  of  the  blood  of  a  whole  army  of  us  that 
iron  enough  is  extracted  to  make  the  commemora- 
tive sword  that  is  voted  to  the  great  Captain. 

In  that  long  aqueduct  which  brings  the  water  of 
life  down  to  us  from  its  far  sources  in  the  Past, 
though  many  have  done  honest  day-labor  in  build- 
ing it,  yet  the  keystone  that  unites  the  arch  of 
every  period  is  engraved  with  the  name  of  the 
greatest  man  alone.  These  are  our  landmarks, 
and  mentally  we  measure  by  these  rather  than  by 
any  scheme  of  Chronology.  If  we  think  of  Phi- 
losophy, we  think  of  four  or  five  great  names,  and 

24 


PIERS  PLOUGHMAN'S  VISION 

SO  of  Poetry,  Astronomy,  and  the  rest.  Geology 
may  give  what  age  she  will  to  the  globe  ;  it  matters 
not,  it  will  still  be  only  so  many  great  men  old ; 
and  wanting  these,  it  is  in  vain  that  Egypt  and  As- 
syria show  us  their  long  bead-roll  of  vacant  centu- 
ries. It  is  in  the  life  of  its  great  men  that  the  life 
and  thought  of  a  people  becomes  statuesque,  rises 
into  poetry,  and  makes  itself  sound  out  clearly  in 
rhythm  and  harmony. 

These  great  persons  get  all  the  fame  and  all  the 
monuments  like  the  generals  of  armies,  though  we 
may  lead  the  forlorn  hope,  or  make  a  palpitating 
bridge  with  our  bodies  in  the  trenches.  Rank  and 
file  may  grumble  a  little  —  but  it  is  always  so,  and 
always  must  be  so.  Fame  would  not  be  fame  if  it 
were  or  could  be  divided  infinitesimally,  and  every 
man  get  his  drachm  and  scruple.  It  is  good  for 
nothing  unless  it  come  in  a  lump.  And  besides,  if 
every  man  got  a  monument  or  an  epitaph  who  felt 
quite  sure  he  deserved  it,  would  marble  hold  out, 
or  Latin  I 

The  fame  of  a  great  poet  is  made  up  of  the  sum 
of  all  the  appreciations  of  many  succeeding  genera- 
tions, each  of  which  he  touches  at  some  one  point. 
He  is  like  a  New  World  into  which  explorer  after  ex- 
plorer enters,  one  to  botanize,  one  to  geologize,  one 
to  ethnologize,  and  each  bringing  back  his  report. 

25 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

His  great  snowy  mountains  perhaps  only  one  man 
in  a  century  goes  to  the  top  of  and  comes  back  to 
tell  us  how  he  saw  from  them  at  once  the  two  great 
oceans  of  Life  and  Death,  the  Atlantic  out  of  which 
we  came,  the  Pacific  toward  which  we  tend. 

Of  the  poet  we  do  not  ask  everything,  but  the 
best  expression  of  the  best  of  everything.  If  a  man 
attain  this  but  once,  though  only  in  a  frail  song, 
he  is  immortal;  while  every  one  who  falls  just 
short  of  it,  if  only  by  a  hair's  breadth,  is  as  sure 
to  be  forgotten.  There  is  a  wonderful  secret  that 
poets  have  not  yet  learned,  and  this  is  that  small 
men  cannot  do  great  things,  but  that  the  small  man 
who  can  do  small  things  best  is  great.  The  most 
fatal  ill-success  is  to  almost  succeed,  as,  in  Italy, 
the  worst  lemons  are  those  large  ones  which  come 
nearest  to  being  oranges.  The  secret  of  permanent 
fame  is  to  express  some  idea  the  most  compactly, 
whether  in  your  life,  your  deed,  or  your  writing. 
I  think  that  if  anything  is  clear  in  history,  it  is 
that  every  idea,  whether  in  morals,  politics,  or  art, 
which  is  laboring  to  express  itself,  feels  of  many 
men  and  throws  them  aside  before  it  finds  the  one 
in  whom  it  can  incarnate  itself.  The  noble  idea 
of  the  Papacy  (for  it  ivas  a  noble  one  —  nothing 
less  than  the  attempt  to  embody  the  higher  law  in 
a  human  institution)  whispered  itself  to  many  be- 

2G 


PIERS  PLOUGHMAN'S  VISION 

fore  it  got  the  man  it  wanted  in  Gregory  the  Great. 
And  Protestantism  carried  numbers  to  the  stake  ere 
it  entered  into  Luther :  a  man  whom  nature  made 
on  purpose  —  all  asbestos  so  that  he  could  not  burn. 
Doubtless  Apollo  spoiled  many  a  reed  before  he 
found  one  that  would  do  to  pipe  through  even  to 
the  sheep  of  Admetus,  and  the  land  of  song  is  scat- 
tered thick  with  reeds  which  the  Mnse  has  experi- 
mented with  and  thrown  away. 

It  is  from  such  a  one  that  I  am  going  to  try  to 
draw  a  few  notes  of  music  and  of  mirth  to-night. 
Contemporary  with  Chaucer  lived  a  man  who  satir- 
ized the  clergy  and  gave  some  lively  pictures  of 
manners  before  the  "  Canterbury  Tales  "  were  writ- 
ten. His  poem  was  very  popular,  as  appears  from 
the  number  of  manuscript  copies  of  it  remaining, 
and  after  being  forgotten  for  two  centuries,  it  was 
revived  again,  printed,  widely  read,  and  helped  on- 
ward the  Reformation  in  England.  It  has  been  re- 
printed twice  during  the  present  century.  This 
assures  us  that  it  must  have  had  a  good  deal  of 
original  force  and  vivacity.  It  may  be  considered, 
however,  to  be  tolerably  defunct  now.  This  poem 
is  the  vision  of  Piers  Ploughman. 

I  have  no  hope  of  reviving  it.  Dead  poets  are 
something  venj  dead,  and  critics  blow  their  trum- 
pets over  them  in  vain.    What  I  think  is  interesting 

27 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  instructive  in  the  poem  is  that  it  illustrates  in 
a  remarkable  manner  what  may  be  considered  the 
Anglo-Saxon  element  in  English  poetry.  I  refer  to 
race,  and  not  to  language.  We  find  here  a  vigorous 
common-sense,  a  simple  and  hearty  love  of  nature, 
a  certain  homely  tenderness,  held  in  check  always 
by  a  dogged  veracity.  Instead  of  Fancy  we  have 
Feeling ;  and,  what  more  especially  deserves  notice, 
there  is  almost  an  entire  want  of  that  sense  of  form 
and  outline  and  proportion  which  alone  brings  any- 
thing within  the  province  of  Art.  Imagination 
shows  itself  now  and  then  in  little  gleams  and 
flashes,  but  always  in  the  form  of  Humor.  For  the 
basis  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  mind  is  beef  and  beer; 
what  it  considers  the  real  as  distinguished  from, 
or  rather  opposed  to,  the  Ideal.  It  spares  nothing 
merely  because  it  is  beautiful.  It  is  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  who  invented  the  word  Humbug,  the  potent 
exorcism  which  lays  the  spirit  of  poetry  in  the  Red 
Sea.  It  is  he  who  always  translates  Shows  into 
Shams. 

Properly  speaking,  "Piers  Ploughman's  Vision" 
is  not  a  poem  at  all.  It  is  a  sermon  rather,  for 
no  verse,  the  chief  end  of  which  is  not  the  repre- 
sentation of  the  beautiful,  and  whose  moral  is  not 
included  in  that,  can  be  called  poetry  in  the  true 
sense  of  the  word.    A  thought  will  become  poetical 

28 


PIERS  PLOUGHMAN'S  VISION 

by  being  put  into  verse  when  a  horse  hair  will  turn 
into  a  snake  by  being  laid  in  water.  The  poetical 
nature  will  delight  in  Mary  Magdalen  more  for  her 
fine  hair  than  for  her  penitence.  But  whatever  is 
poetical  in  this  book  seems  to  me  characteristically 
Saxon.  The  English  Muse  has  mixed  blood  in  her 
veins,  and  I  think  that  what  she  gets  from  the 
Saxon  is  a  certain  something  homely  and  practical, 
a  flavor  of  the  goodwife  which  is  hereditary.  She 
is  the  descendant  on  one  side  of  Poor  Eichard,  in- 
spired, it  is  true,  but  who  always  brings  her  knit- 
ting in  her  pocket.  The  light  of  the  soul  that 
shines  through  her  countenance,  that  "light  that 
never  was  on  land  or  sea,"  is  mingled  with  the  warm 
glow  from  the  fireside  on  the  hearth  of  Home.  In- 
deed, may  it  not  be  attributed  to  the  Teutonic 
heart  as  something  peculiar  to  it,  that  it  has  breadth 
enough  to  embrace  at  once  the  chimney-corner  and 
the  far-reaching  splendors  of  Heaven  ?  Happy  for 
it  when  the  smoke  and  cookery-steam  of  the  one 
do  not  obscure  the  other ! 

I  find  no  fault  with  the  author  of  Piers  Plough- 
man for  not  being  a  poet.  Every  man  cannot  be  a 
poet  (fortunately),  nor  every  poet  a  great  one.  It 
is  the  privilege  of  the  great  to  be  always  contem- 
poraneous, to  speak  of  fugacious  events  in  words 
that  shall  be  perennial.     But  to  the  poets  of  the 

29 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

second  rate  we  go  for  pictures  of  manners  that  have 
passed  away,  for  transitory  facts,  for  modes  of  life 
and  ways  of  thinking  that  were  circumstantial 
merely.  They  give  us  reflections  of  our  outward, 
as  their  larger  brethren  do  of  our  inward,  selves. 
They  deal,  as  it  were,  with  costume ;  the  other  with 
man  himself. 

But  these  details  are  of  interest,  so  fond  are  we 
of  facts.  We  all  have  seen  the  congregation  which 
grew  sleepy  while  the  preacher  talked  of  the  other 
world  give  a  stir  of  pleased  attention  if  he  brought 
in  a  personal  anecdote  about  this.  Books  are  writ- 
ten and  printed,  and  we  read  them  to  tell  us  how 
our  forefathers  cocked  their  hats,  or  turned  up  the 
points  of  their  shoes;  when  blacking  and  starch 
were  introduced ;  who  among  the  Anglo-Saxons 
carried  the  first  umbrella,  and  who  borrowed  it. 

These  trifles,  also,  acquire  importance  in  propor- 
tion as  they  are  older.  If  a  naturalist  showed  us  a 
toad,  we  should  be  indifferent,  but  if  he  told  us  that 
it  had  been  found  in  a  block  of  granite,  we  should 
instantly  look  with  profound  interest  on  a  creature 
that  perhaps  ate  moths  in  Abel's  garden,  or  hopped 
out  of  the  path  of  Lamech.  And  the  same  precious 
jewel  of  instruction  we  find  in  the  ugly  little  facts 
embedded  in  early  literatures.  They  teach  us  the 
unchangeableness  of  man  and  his  real  independence 

30 


PIERS  PLOUGHMAN'S  VISION 

of  his  accidents.  He  is  the  same  old  lay  figure 
under  all  his  draperies,  and  sits  to  one  artist  for  a 
John  and  to  another  for  a  Judas,  and  serves  equally 
well  for  both  portraits.  The  oldest  fable  reappears 
in  the  newest  novel.  Aristophanes  makes  coats  that 
fit  us  still.  Voltaire  is  Lucian  translated  into  the 
eighteenth  century.  Augustus  turns  up  in  Louis 
Napoleon.  The  whirligig  of  Time  brings  back  at 
regular  intervals  the  same  actors  and  situations,  and 
under  whatever  names  —  Ormuzd  and  Ahriman, 
Protestantism  and  Catholicism,  Reform  and  Con- 
servatism, Transcendentalism  and  Realism.  We 
see  the  same  ancient  quarrel  renewed  from  genera- 
tion to  generation,  till  we  begin  to  doubt  whether 
this  be  truly  the  steps  of  a  Tower  of  Babel  that  we 
are  mounting,  and  not  rather  a  treadmill,  where  we 
get  all  the  positive  good  of  the  exercise  and  none 
of  the  theoretic  ill  which  might  come  if  we  could 
once  solve  the  problem  of  getting  above  ourselves. 
Man's  life  continues  to  be,  as  the  Saxon  noble  de- 
scribed it,  the  flight  of  a  sparrow  through  a  lighted 
hall,  out  of  one  darkness  and  into  another,  and  the 
two  questions  whence  f  and  ivhither  f  were  no  tougher 
to  Adam  than  to  us.  The  author  of  Piers  Plough- 
man's Vision  has  offered  us  his  theory  of  this 
world  and  the  next,  and  in  doing  so  gives  some 
curious  hints  of  modes  of  life  and  of  thought.    It  is 

31 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

generally  agreed  that  one  of  his  names  was  Lang- 
land,  and  it  is  disputed  whether  the  other  was 
Robert  or  William.  Robert  has  the  most  author- 
ity, and  William  the  strongest  arguments  in  its 
favor.  It  is  of  little  consequence  now  to  him  or 
us.  He  was  probably  a  monk  at  Malvern.  His 
poem  is  a  long  one,  written  in  the  unrhymed 
alliterative  measure  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  poetry, 
and  the  plan  of  it  is  of  the  simplest  kind.  It  is  a 
continued  allegory,  in  which  all  the  vices,  passions, 
and  follies  of  the  time,  the  powers  of  the  mind,  the 
qualities  of  the  spirit,  and  the  theological  dogmas 
of  the  author,  are  personified  and  mixed  up  with 
real  personages  with  so  much  simplicity,  and  with 
such  unconscious  interfusion  of  actual  life  as  to 
give  the  whole  an  air  of  probability. 

The  author  of  Piers  Ploughman's  Vision  avoids 
any  appearance  of  incongruity  by  laying  his  scene 
in  a  world  which  is  neither  wholly  real  nor 
wholly  imaginary  —  the  realm  of  sleep  and  dreams. 
There  it  does  not  astonish  us  that  Langland 
should  meet  and  talk  with  the  theological  virtues, 
and  that  very  avoirdupois  knights,  monks,  ab- 
bots, friars,  and  ploughmen  should  be  found  in 
company  with  such  questionable  characters  as  Do- 
well,  Do-better,  Do-best,  Conscience,  Nature,  Clergy, 
and  Activa  Vita.  He  has  divided  Ms  poem  into 
twenty  "  steps,"  as  he  calls  them,  in  each  of  which 

32 


PIERS   PLOUGHMAN'S  VISION 

he  falls  asleep,  has  a  dream,  and  wakes  up  when  it 
becomes  convenient  or  he  is  at  a  loss  what  else  to 
do.  Meanwhile  his  real  characters  are  so  very  real, 
and  his  allegorical  ones  mingle  with  them  on  such 
a  common  ground  of  easy  familiarity,  that  we  for- 
get the  allegory  altogether.  We  are  not  surprised 
to  find  those  Utopian  edifices,  the  Tower  of  Truth 
and  the  Church  of  Unity,  in  the  same  street  with 
an  alehouse  as  genuine  as  that  of  Tam  o'  Shanter, 
and  it  would  seem  nothing  out  of  the  common  if 
we  should  see  the  twelve  signs  of  the  Zodiac  saving 
themselves  from  Deucalion's  flood  in  an  arc  of  the 
Ecliptic. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  read  long  extracts  from  the 
poem,  with  a  commentary  of  his  own,  generally 
brief,  of  which  we  can  give  only  the  following 
fine   passage   on   Personification. 

The  truth  is,  that  ideal  personifications  are  com- 
monly little  better  than  pinchbeck  substitutes  for 
imagination.  They  are  a  refuge  which  unimagina- 
tive minds  seek  from  their  own  sterile  imaginative- 
ness. They  stand  in  the  same  relation  to  poetry  as 
wax  figures  to  sculpture.  The  more  nearly  they 
counterfeit  reality,  the  more  unpleasant  they  are, 
and  there  is  always  a  dejected  irresponsibleness 
about  the  legs  and  a  Brattle  street  air  in  the  boots 
that  is  ludicrous.  The  imagination  gives  us  no  pic- 
tures, but  the  thing  itself.    It  goes  out  for  the  mo- 

3  33 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ment  to  dwell  in  and  inform  with  its  own  life  the 
object  of  its  vision  —  as  Keats  says  somewhere 
in  one  of  his  letters,  "  I  hop  about  the  gravel  and 
pick  up  crumbs  in  the  sparrows."  And  so,  in  per- 
sonifying, the  imagination  must  have  energy  to 
project  its  own  emotion  so  as  to  see  it  objectively  — 
just  as  the  disease  of  the  hypochondriac  runs  be- 
fore him  in  a  black  dog.  Thus  it  was  that  the  early 
poets,  "  who  believed  the  wonders  that  they  sang," 
peopled  the  forests,  floods,  and  mountains  with 
real  shapes  of  beauty  or  terror ;  and  accordingly  in 
primitive  times  ecstasy  is  always  attributed  to  the 
condition  of  the  poetic  mind.  To  the  great  poets 
these  ecstasies  are  still  possible,  and  personification 
had  its  origin  in  the  tradition  of  these,  and  the  en- 
deavor of  inferior  minds  to  atone  for  their  own 
languor  by  what  we  may  call  historical  or  remin- 
iscental  imagination.  Here  is  indicated  the  decline 
from  faith  to  ritual.  Shakspeare  has  illustrated 
the  true  secret  of  imaginative  personification  when 
he  makes  the  conscience  of  Macbeth  become  ex- 
ternal and  visible  to  him  in  the  ghastly  shape  at 
the  banquet  which  he  alone  can  see,  and  Lady  Mac- 
beth's  afterwards  in  the  blood-stain  on  her  hand. 
This  is  the  personification  of  the  creative  mind 
whose  thoughts  are  not  images,  but  things.  And 
this  seems  to  have  been  the  normal  condition  of 
Shakspeare's  genius,  as  it  is  the  exceptional  one  of 

34 


PIERS  PLOUGHMAN'S  VISION 

all  other  poets.  He  alone  lias  embodied  in  flesh  and 
blood  his  every  thought  and  fancy  and  emotion, 
his  every  passion  and  temptation.  Beside  him  all 
other  poets  seem  but  the  painters  and  not  the 
makers  of  men.  He  sent  out  his  profound  intellect 
to  look  at  life  from  every  point  of  view,  and  through 
the  eyes  of  all  men  and  women  from  the  highest  to 
the  lowest.  In  every  one  he  seems  to  have  tapped 
it  with  the  knuckles,  to  have  said  sadly,  Tinnit,  inane 
est,  It  rings,  it  is  hollow;  and  then  to  have  gone 
down  quietly  to  wait  for  death  and  another  world 
at  Stratford. 

As  fine  an  example  as  any  of  the  prose  imagina- 
tion, of  the  intellect  acting  pictorially,  is  where 
Hobbes  compares  the  Papacy  to  the  ghost  of  the 
Roman  Empire  sitting  upon  its  tomb.  This  implies 
a  foregone  personification,  but  the  pleasure  it  gives 
springs  chiefly  from  our  sense  of  its  historic  and 
intellectual  truth.  And  this  subordinate  form  of 
imagination  uses  typically  and  metaphorically  those 
forms  in  which  ecstasy  had  formerly  visibly  clothed 
itself,  flesh-and-blooded  itself,  so  to  speak ;  as  where 
Lord  Bacon  says  that  Persecution  in  the  name  of 
Religion  is  "to  bring  down  the  Holy  Grhost,  not  in 
the  likeness  of  a  dove,  but  in  the  shape  of  a  vulture 
or  a  raven." 

After  reading  more  extracts  from  the  poem,  Mr. 
Lowell  concluded  his  lecture  in  these  words : 

35 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Trulv  it  seems  to  me  that  I  can  feel  a  heart  beat 
all  through  this  old  poem,  a  manly,  trustful,  and 
tender  one.  There  are  some  men  who  have  what 
may  be  called  a  vindictive  love  of  Truth  —  whose 
love  of  it,  indeed,  seems  to  be  only  another  form  of 
hatred  to  their  neighbor.  They  put  crooked  pins 
on  the  stool  of  repentance  before  they  invite  the 
erring  to  sit  down  on  it.  Our  brother  Langland  is 
plainly  not  one  of  these. 

What  I  especially  find  to  our  purpose  in  Piers 
Ploughman,  as  I  said  before,  is  that  it  defines 
with  tolerable  exactness  those  impulses  which  our 
poetry  has  received  from  the  Anglo-Saxon  as 
distinguished  from  the  Anglo-Norman  element  of 
our  race.  It  is  a  common  Yankee  proverb  that 
there  is  a  great  deal  of  human  nature  in  man.  I 
think  it  especially  true  of  the  Anglo-Saxon  man. 
We  find  in  this  poem  common  sense,  tenderness,  a 
love  of  spiritual  goodness  without  much  sensibility 
to  the  merely  beautiful,  a  kind  of  domestic  feeling 
of  nature  and  a  respect  for  what  is  established.  But 
what  is  still  more  noticeable  is  that  man  is  recog- 
nized as  man,  and  that  the  conservatism  of  Lang- 
land  is  predicated  upon  the  well-being  of  the  people. 

It  is  impossible  to  revive  a  dead  poem,  but  it  is 
pleasant,  at  least,  to  throw  a  memorial  flower  upon 
its  grave. 

36 


LECTUEE   III 

THE  METEICAL   ROMANCES 

{Tuesday  Evening,  Januarij  16,  1855) 


Ill 


WHERE  is  the  Golden  Age?  It  is  fifty  years 
ago  to  every  man  and  woman  of  three-score 
and  ten.  I  do  not  doubt  that  aged  Adam  babbled  of 
the  superiority  of  the  good  old  times,  and,  forgetful 
in  his  enthusiasm  of  that  fatal  bite  which  set  the 
teeth  of  all  his  descendants  on  edge,  told,  with  a  re- 
gretful sigh,  how  much  larger  and  finer  the  apples  of 
his  youth  were  than  that  to  which  the  great-grand- 
son on  his  knee  was  giving  a  preliminary  polish. 
Meanwhile  the  great-grandson  sees  the  good  times 
far  in  front,  a  galaxy  of  golden  pippins  whereof  he 
shall  pluck  and  eat  as  many  as  he  likes  without 
question.  Thus  it  is  that  none  of  us  knows  when 
Time  is  with  him,  but  the  old  man  sees  only  his 
shoulders  and  that  inexorable  wallet  in  which  youth 
and  beauty  and  strength  are  borne  away  as  alms  for 
Oblivion ;  and  the  boy  beholds  but  the  glowing  face 
and  the  hands  stretched  out  full  of  gifts  like  those 
of  a  St.  Nicholas.  Thus  there  is  never  any  present 
good  ;  but  the  juggler.  Life,  smilingly  baffles  us  all, 
making  us  believe  that  the  vanished  ring  is  under 

39 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

his  left  hand  or  his  right,  the  past  or  the  future, 
and  shows  us  at  last  that  it  was  in  our  own  pocket 
all  the  while. 

So  we  may  always  listen  with  composure  when 
we  hear  of  Golden  Ages  passed  away.  Burke  pro- 
nounced the  funeral  oration  of  one  —  of  the  age  of 
Chivalry — the  period  of  Metrical  Romances  —  of 
which  I  propose  to  speak  to-night.  Mr.  Ruskin  — 
himself  as  true  a  knight-errant  as  ever  sat  in  a 
demij)ique  saddle,  ready  to  break  a  lance  with  all 
comers,  and  resolved  that  even  the  windmills  and 
the  drovers  shall  not  go  about  their  business  till 
they  have  done  homage  to  his  Dulcinea  —  for  the 
time  being  joins  in  the  lament.  Nay,  what  do 
we  learn  from  the  old  romances  themselves,  but 
that  all  the  heroes  were  already  dead  and  buried? 
Their  song  also  is  a  threnody,  if  we  listen  rightly. 
For  when  did  Oliver  and  Roland  live?  When 
Arthur  and  Tristem  and  Lancelot  and  Caradoc 
Break-arm  ?  In  that  Golden  Age  of  Chivalry 
which  is  always  past. 

Undoubtedly  there  was  a  great  deal  in  the  insti- 
tution of  Chivalry  that  was  picturesque;  but  it  is 
noticeable  in  countries  where  society  is  still  pictur- 
esque that  dirt  and  ignorance  and  tyranny  have  the 
chief  hand  in  making  them  so.  Mr.  Fenimore 
Cooper  thought  the  American  savage  picturesque, 

40 


THE   METRICAL  ROMANCES 

but  if  he  had  lived  in  a  time  when  it  was  neces- 
sary that  one  should  take  out  a  policy  of  insurance 
on  his  scalp  or  wig  before  going  to  bed,  he  might 
have  seen  them  in  a  different  light.  The  tourist 
looks  up  with  delight  at  the  eagle  sliding  in  smooth- 
winged  circles  on  the  icy  mountain  air,  and  spark- 
ling back  the  low  morning  sun  like  a  belated  star. 
But  what  does  the  lamb  think  of  him?  Let  us 
look  at  Chivalry  a  moment  from  the  lamb's  point 
of  view. 

It  is  true  that  the  investiture  of  the  Knight  was 
a  religious  ceremony,  but  this  was  due  to  the 
Church,  which  in  an  age  of  brute  force  always 
maintained  the  traditions  at  least  of  the  intellect 
and  conscience.  The  vows  which  the  Knights  took 
had  as  little  force  as  those  of  god-parents,  who  fulfil 
their  spiritual  relation  by  sending  a  piece  of  plate 
to  the  god-child.  They  stood  by  each  other  when 
it  was  for  their  interest  to  do  so,  but  the  only  virtue 
they  had  any  respect  for  was  an  arm  stronger  than 
their  own.  It  is  hard  to  say  which  they  preferred 
to  break  —  a  head,  or  one  of  the  Ten  Command- 
ments. They  looked  upon  the  rich  Jew  with  thirty- 
two  sound  teeth  in  his  head  as  a  providential  con- 
trivance, and  practised  upon  him  a  comprehensive 
kind  of  dental  surgery,  at  once  for  profit  and 
amusement,   and    then    put    into    some   chapel    a 

41 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

painted  window  with  a  Jewish  prophet  in  it  for  piety 
—  as  if  tlieij  were  the  Jewish  profits  they  cared 
about.  They  outraged  and  robbed  their  vassals  in 
every  conceivable  manner,  and,  if  very  religious, 
made  restitution  on  their  death-beds  by  giving  a 
part  of  the  plunder  (when  they  could  keep  it  no 
longer)  to  have  masses  sung  for  the  health  of  their 
souls — thus  contriving,  as  they  thought,  to  be  their 
own  heirs  in  the  other  world.  Individual  examples 
of  heroism  are  not  wanting  to  show  that  man  is  al- 
ways paramount  to  the  institutions  of  his  own  con- 
triving, so  that  any  institution  will  yield  itself  to 
the  compelling  charms  of  a  noble  nature.  But  even 
were  this  not  so,  yet  Sir  Philip  Sidney,  the  stand- 
ard type  of  the  chivah-ous,  grew  up  under  other  in- 
fluences. So  did  Lord  Herbert  of  Cherbury,  so  did 
the  incomparable  Bayard ;  and  the  single  fact  that 
is  related  as  a  wonderful  thing  of  Bayard,  that,  after 
the  storming  of  Brescia,  he  respected  the  honor  of 
the  daughter  of  a  lady  in  whose  house  he  was  quar- 
tered, notwithstanding  she  was  beautiful  and  in  his 
power,  is  of  more  weight  than  all  the  romances  in 
Don  Quixote's  library. 

But  what  form  is  that  which  rises  before  us,  with 
features  in  which  the  gentle  and  forgiving  reproach 
of  the  woman  is  lost  in  the  aspiring  power  of  the 
martyr ! 

42 


THE  METRICAL  ROMANCES 
We  know  her  as  she  was, 

The  whitest  Uly  in  the  shield  of  Frauce, 
With  heart  of  virgin  gold, 

that  bravest  and  most  loyal  heart  over  whose  beat- 
ings knightly  armor  was  ever  buckled,  that  saintly 
shape  in  which  even  battle  looks  lovely,  that  life  so 
pure,  so  inspired,  so  humble,  which  stands  there 
forever  to  show  us  how  near  womanhood  ever  is  to 
heroism,  and  that  the  human  heart  is  true  to  an  eter- 
nal instinct  when  it  paints  Faith  and  Hope  and  Char- 
ity and  Religion  with  the  countenances  of  women. 

We  are  told  that  the  sentiment  of  respect  for 
woman,  a  sentiment  always  remarkable  in  the  Teu- 
tonic race,  is  an  inheritance  from  the  Institution  of 
Chivalry.  But  womanhood  must  be  dressed  in  silk 
and  miniver  that  chivalry  may  recognize  it.  That 
priceless  pearl  hidden  in  the  coarse  kirtle  of  the 
peasant-girl  of  Domremy  it  trampled  under  its 
knightly  feet  —  shall  I  say?  —  or  swinish  hoofs. 
Poor  Joan!  The  chivalry  of  France  sold  her;  the 
chivalry  of  England  subjected  her  to  outrages 
whose  burning  shame  cooled  the  martyr- fire,  and 
the  King  whom  she  had  saved,  the  very  top  of 
French  Knighthood,  was  toying  with  Agnes  Sorel 
while  the  fagots  were  crackling  around  the  savior 
of  himself  and  his  kingdom  in  the  square  of  Rouen! 

43 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

Thank  God,  that  onr  niichivah-ic  generation  can 
hack  the  golden  spurs  from  such  recreant  heels ! 
A  statue  stands  now  where  her  ashes  were  gathered 
to  be  cast  into  the  Seine,  but  her  fittest  monument 
is  the  little  fountain  beneath  it,  the  emblem  of 
her  innocence,  of  her  inspiration,  drawn  not  from 
court,  or  castle,  or  cloister,  but  from  the  inscru- 
table depths  of  that  old  human  nature  and  that 
heaven  common  to  us  all — an  emblem,  no  less, 
that  the  memory  of  a  devoted  life  is  a  siDriug  where 
all  coming  times  may  drink  the  holy  waters  of 
gratitude  and  aspiration.  I  confess  that  I  cannot 
see  clearly  that  later  scaffold  in  the  Place  de  la 
Revolution,  through  the  smoke  of  this  martyr-fire 
at  Rouen,  but  it  seems  to  me  that,  compared  with 
this  ivoman,  the  Marie  Antoinette,  for  whose  sake 
Burke  lamented  the  downfall  of  chivalry,  is  only 
the  daughter  of  a  king. 

But  those  old  days,  whether  good  or  bad,  have 
left  behind  them  a  great  body  of  literature,  of  which 
even  yet  a  large  part  remains  unprinted.  To  this 
literature  belong  the  Metrical  Romances.  As- 
tonished by  the  fancy  and  invention  so  abundantly 
displayed  by  the  writers  of  these  poems,  those  who 
have  written  upon  the  subject  have  set  themselves 
gravely  to  work  to  find  out  what  country  they  could 
have  got  them  from.     Mr.  Warton,  following  Dr. 

44 


THE  METRICAL  ROMANCES 

Wai'burton,  inclines  to  assign  them  to  an  Oriental 
origin.  Dr.  Percy,  on  the  other  hand,  asserts  a 
Scandinavian  origin ;  while  Ritson,  who  would  have 
found  it  reason  enough  to  think  that  the  sun  rose 
in  the  West  if  Warton  or  Percy  had  taken  the  other 
side,  is  jDOsitive  that  they  were  wholly  French. 
Perhaps  the  truth  lies  somewhere  between  the  posi- 
tions of  Percy  and  Ritson.  The  Normau  race, 
neither  French  nor  Scandinavian,  was  a  product  of 
the  mingled  blood  of  both,  and  in  its  mental  char- 
acteristics we  find  the  gaiety  and  lively  fancy  of 
the  one  tempering  what  is  wild  in  the  energy  and 
gloomy  in  the  imagination  of  the  other. 

We  know  the  exact  date  of  the  arrival  of  the 
first  Metrical  Romance  in  England.  Taillefer,  a 
Norman  minstrel,  brought  it  over  in  his  head,  and 
rode  in  the  front  at  the  battle  of  Hastings  singing 
the  song  of  Roland.  Taillefer  answers  precisely 
the  description  of  a  Danish  skald,  but  he  sang  in 
French,  and  the  hero  he  celebrated  was  one  of  the 
peers  of  Charlemagne,  who  was  himself  a  German. 

Taillefer,  who  well  could  giug  a  strain, 
Upon  a  swift  horse  rode  amain 
Before  the  Duke  and  chanted  loud 
Of  Charlemagne  and  Roland  good, 
Of  Oliver  and  vassals  brave 
Who  found  at  Roncesvalles  their  grave. 

45 


/o 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

What  this  song  of  Roland  was  it  is  impossible 
to  say,  as  the  only  copy  of  it  seems  to  have  per- 
ished with  Taillefer  at  the  battle  of  Hastings ;  but 
it  was  probably  of  the  same  kind  with  many  of 
those  which  have  survived  and  brought  down  to 
us  the  exploits  of  Arthur  and  his  knights. 

With  regard  to  a  large  part  of  the  romances  of 
the  Round  Table,  and  those  which  grew  out  of 
them,  it  is  tolerably  certain  that,  although  written 
in  French,  they  were  made  in  England. 

One  of  the  great  charms  of  the  Metrical  Romances 
is  the  innocent  simplicity  with  which  they  commit 
anachronisms.  Perhaps  it  would  be  more  exact  to 
call  them  synchronisms,  for,  with  the  most  undoubt- 
ing  faith,  they  compel  all  other  times  to  adopt  the 
dress,  manners,  and  conventionalities  of  their  own. 
To  them  there  was  no  one  world,  nor  ever  had  been 
any,  except  that  of  Romance.  They  conferred  re- 
trospective knighthood  upon  the  patriarchs ;  upon 
Job,  David,  and  Solomon.  Joseph  of  Arimathea 
became  Sir  Joseph  of  that  ilk.  Even  the  soldier 
who  pierced  the  side  of  Jesus  upon  the  cross  was 
made  into  Sir  Longinus  and  represented  as  running 
a  tilt  with  our  Lord.  All  the  heroes  of  the  Grecian 
legend  were  treated  in  the  same  way.  They  trans- 
lated the  old  time  and  the  old  faith  into  new,  and 
thus  completed  the  outfit  of  their  own  imaginary 

46 


THE  METRICAL  ROMANCES 

world,  supplying  it  at  a  very  cheap  rate  with  a  Past 
and  with  mythology.  And  as  they  believed  the 
gods  and  genii  of  the  Pagan  ancients  to  have  been 
evil  spirits  who,  though  undeified,  were  imperish- 
able in  their  essence,  they  were  allowed  to  emigrate 
in  a  body  from  the  old  religion  into  the  new,  where 
they  continued  to  exercise  their  functions,  some- 
times under  their  former  names,  but  oftener  in  some 
disguise.  These  unfortunate  aliens  seem  to  have 
lived  very  much  from  hand  to  mouth,  and  after  the 
invention  of  holy  water  (more  terrible  to  them  than 
Greek-fire)  they  must  have  had  rather  an  uncom- 
fortable time  of  it.  The  giants  were  received  with 
enthusiasm,  and  admitted  to  rights  of  citizenship 
in  the  land  of  Romance,  where  they  were  allowed 
to  hold  fiefs  and  castles  in  consideration  of  their 
eminent  usefulness  in  abducting  damsels,  and  their 
serving  as  anvils  to  the  knights,  who  sometimes  be- 
labored them  for  three  days  at  a  time,  the  fight  end- 
ing at  last,  not  from  failure  of  breath  on  the  part 
of  the  combatants  but  of  the  minstrel.  As  soon  as 
he  has  enough,  or  sees  that  his  hearers  have,  the  head 
of  the  unhappy  giant  becomes  loose  on  his  shoulders. 
Another  charm  of  the  romances  is  their  entire 
inconsequentiality.  As  soon  as  we  enter  this  won- 
derful country  the  old  fetters  of  cause  and  effect 
drop  from  our  limbs,  and  we  are  no  longer  bound 

47 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

to  give  a  reason  for  anything.  All  things  come  to 
pass  in  that  most  charming  of  ways  which  children 
explain  by  the  comprehensive  metaphysical  for- 
mula— "  'mM5e."  Nothing  seems  to  be  premeditated, 
but  a  knight  falls  in  love,  or  out  of  it,  fights,  goes 
on  board  enchanted  vessels  that  carry  him  to  coun- 
tries laid  down  on  no  chart,  and  all  without  asking 
a  question.  In  truth,  it  is  a  delightful  kind  of  im- 
promptu life,  such  as  we  all  should  like  to  lead  if  we 
could,  with  nothing  set  down  in  the  bills  beforehand. 

But  the  most  singular  peculiarity  of  Romance- 
land  remains  to  be  noticed — there  are  no  people  in 
it,  that  is,  no  common  people.  The  lowest  rank  in 
life  is  that  of  a  dwarf.  It  is  true  that  if  a  knight 
loses  his  way  there  will  always  be  a  clown  or  two 
to  set  him  right.  But  they  disappear  at  once,  and 
seem  to  be  wholly  phantasmagoric,  or,  at  best,  an  ex- 
pedient rendered  necessary  by  the  absence  of  guide- 
posts,  and  the  inability  of  the  cavaliers  to  read  them 
if  there  had  been  any.  There  are  plenty  of  Sara- 
cens no  doubt,  but  they  are  more  like  cucumbers 
than  men,  and  are  introduced  merely  that  the  knight 
may  have  the  pleasure  of  slicing  them. 

We  cannot  claim  any  condensed  poetical  merit 
for  the  Metrical  Romances.  They  have  very  few 
quotable  passages  and  fewer  vigorous  single  lines. 
Their  merit  consists  in  a  diffuse  picturesqueness,  and 

48 


THE  METRICAL  ROMANCES 

reading  them  is  like  turning  over  illuminated  mis- 
sals in  a  traveler's  half-hour,  which  leave  a  vague 
impression  on  the  mind  of  something  vivid  and 
fanciful,  without  one's  being  able  to  recall  any  par- 
ticular beauty.    Some  of  them  have  great  narrative 
merit,  being  straightforward  and  to  the  purpose, 
never  entangling  themselves  in  reflection  or  sub- 
ordinating the  story  to  the  expression.     In  this  re- 
spect they  are  refreshing  after  reading  many  poems 
of  the  modern  school,  which,  under  the  pretense  of 
sensuousness,  are  truly  sensual,  and  deal  quite  as 
much  with  the  upholstery  as  with  the  soul  of  poetry. 
The  thought  has  nowadays  become  of  less  impor- 
tance than  the  vehicle  of  it,  and  amid  the  pomp  of 
words  we  are  too  often  reminded  of  an  Egyptian 
procession,  in  which  all  the  painful  musical  instru- 
ments then  invented,  priests,  soldiers,  and  royalty 
itself,  accompany  the  triumphal  chariot  containing 
perhaps,  after  all,  only  an  embalmed  monkey  or  a 
pickled  ibis. 

There  is  none  of  this  nonsense  in  the  Old  Ro- 
mances, though  sometimes  they  are  tediously  senti- 
mental, and  we  wonder  as  much  at  the  capacity  of 
our  ancestors  in  bearing  dry  verses  as  dry  blows. 
Generally,  however,  they  show  an  unaffected  piety 
and  love  of  nature.  The  delight  of  the  old  minstrels 
in  the  return  of  Spring  is  particularly  agreeable, 

4  49 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  another  argument  in  favor  of  the  Northern 
origin  of  this  class  of  poems.  Many  of  them  open 
with  passages  like  this : 

Merry  it  is  in  the  month  of  May, 

When  the  small  fowls  sing  their  lay, 

Then  flowers  the  apple-tree  and  perry, 

And  the  little  birds  sing  merry ; 

Then  the  ladies  strew  their  bowers 

With  red  roses  and  lily  flowers. 

The  damisels  lead  down  the  dance, 

And  the  knights  play  with  shield  and  lance. 

Some  of  the  comparisons,  also,  drawn  from  Na- 
ture, are  as  fresh  as  dew.  For  example,  when  a 
lady  sees  her  lover : 

She  is  as  glad  at  that  sight 
As  the  birds  are  of  the  light. 

Or, 

As  glad  as  grass  is  of  the  rain. 

A  knight  is  said  to  be 

As  weary  as  water  in  a  weir, 
a  simile  full  of  imagination. 

50 


THE  METRICAL   ROMANCES 

The  most  airy  glimpses  of  the  picturesque  occur 
sometimes ;  as  describing  a  troop  of  knights : 

They  rode  away  full  serriedly, 
Their  gilded  pennons  of  silk  of  Ind 
Merrily  rattled  with  the  wind ; 
The  steeds  so  noble  and  so  wight 
Leaped  and  neighed  beneath  each  knight. 

After  quoting  various  specimens  of  these  poems, 
Mr.  Lowell  gave  the  following  sketch  of  the  man- 
ners and  customs  of  Romance-laud,  "condensed 
from  the  best  authorities." 

If  you  are  born  in  this  remarkable  country  and 
destined  for  a  hero,  the  chances  are  that  by  the 
time  you  are  seven  years  old  your  father  will  have 
gone  off  to  fight  the  infidels,  and  a  neighboring 
earl  will  have  taken  possession  of  his  estates  and 
his  too-hastily-supposed  widow.  You  resent  this 
in  various  ways,  especially  by  calling  your  step- 
father all  the  proper  names  you  can  think  of  that 
are  improper.  He,  for  some  unexplained  reason,  is 
unable  to  get  rid  of  you,  though  he  tries  a  variety 
of  plots  level  with  the  meanest  capacity.  You,  be- 
ing of  uncommon  sagacity,  are  saved  by  the  aid  of 
three  or  four  superfluous  miracles.  Meanwhile  you 
contrive  to  pick  up  a  good  knightly  education,  and 
by   the   time   you   are   seventeen    are   bigger   and 

51 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

stronger  and  handsomer  than  anybody  else,  ex- 
cept, of  course,  the  giants.  So,  one  day  you  buckle 
on  your  armor,  mount  your  horse,  who  is  as  re- 
markable in  his  way  as  yourself,  and  go  adventur- 
ing. Presently  you  come  to  a  castle  where  you 
are  most  courteously  received.  Maidens  as  white 
as  whale's  bone  and  fair  as  flowers  (they  are  all  so 
in  Romance-land)  help  you  off  with  your  armor, 
and  dress  you  in  richest  silks.  You  then  go  to 
dine  with  the  Lord  of  the  Castle,  who  is  a  knight 
of  very  affable  manners  and  agreeable  conversa- 
tion, but  with  an  aversion  to  religious  topics.  His 
daughter,  the  fairest  lady  on  the  ground,  assists  at 
the  meal.  You  are  conducted  to  your  chamber, 
and  after  a  refreshing  sleep  meet  your  host  and 
hostess  at  breakfast.  At  a  suitable  time  you  re- 
turn thanks  for  your  kind  treatment  and  ask  for 
your  horse.  The  knight,  however,  in  the  blandest 
manner  tells  you  that  a  little  custom  of  his  will  in- 
terfere with  your  departure.  He  is  in  the  habit  of 
fighting  with  all  his  guests,  and  has  hitherto  been 
successful  in  killing  them  all  to  the  number  of 
several  hundred.  This  is  precisely  the  account 
which  you  are  fond  of  settling,  and  after  a  few 
allusions  to  Mahomed  and  Termagant  and  Alcoban, 
you  accept  the  challenge  and,  of  course,  come  off 
victor.    This   seems  to   settle  the  matter  for  the 

52 


THE  METRICAL  ROMANCES 

young  lady  whom  your  lance  has  just  promoted  to 
her  inheritance,  and  she  immediately  offers  herself 
and  her  estates  to  you,  telling  you,  at  the  same 
time,  that  she  had  long  been  secretly  a  Christian. 
Though  madly  in  love  with  her,  and  interested  in 
her  religious  views,  which  she  details  to  you  at 
some  length,  you  mount  your  steed  and  ride  away, 
but  without  being  expected  to  give  any  reasons. 
You  have  a  particular  mission  nowhere,  and  on 
your  way  to  that  interesting  country  you  kill  a 
megalosaunis  (for  whose  skeleton  Professor  Owen 
would  have  given  his  ears),  and  two  or  three  inci- 
dental giants.  Riding  on,  you  come  to  a  Paynim- 
land,  ruled  over  by  a  liberally-minded  Soldan,  who 
receives  you  into  favor  after  you  have  slain  some 
thousands  of  his  subjects  to  get  an  appetite  for 
dinner.  The  Soldan,  of  course,  has  a  daughter, 
who  is  converted  by  you,  and,  of  course,  offers  you 
her  hand.  This  makes  you  think  of  the  other  lady, 
and  you  diplomatize.  But  there  is  another  Payuim- 
land,  and  another  Soldan,  who  sends  word  that  he 
intends  to  marry  your  beautiful  convert. 

The  embassy  of  the  proud  Paynim  somehow  re- 
sults in  your  being  imprisoned  for  seven  years, 
when  it  suddenly  occurs  to  you  that  you  might 
as  well  step  out.  So  you  pick  up  a  magic  sword 
that  has  been  shut  up  with  you,  knock  down  the 

4*  53 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

jailers,  mount  your  horse  which  is  waiting  at  the 
door,  and  ride  off.  Now,  or  at  some  other  conven- 
ient time,  you  take  occasion  to  go  mad  for  a  year 
or  two  on  account  of  ladye-love  number  one.  But 
hearing  that  ladye-love  number  two  is  about  to 
yield  to  the  addresses  of  her  royal  suitor,  who  has 
killed  her  father,  burned  his  capital,  and  put  all  his 
subjects  to  the  sword,  you  make  some  appropriate 
theological  disquisitions  and  start  to  the  rescue. 
On  your  way  you  meet  a  strange  knight,  join  com- 
bat with  him  without  any  questions  on  either  side, 
and  after  a  doubtful  fight  of  a  day  or  two,  are  mutu- 
ally overcome  with  amazement  at  finding  anybody 
who  cannot  be  beaten.  Of  course  it  turns  out  that 
the  strange  knight  is  your  father ;  you  join  forces, 
make  short  work  with  the  amorous  Soldan  and  his 
giants,  and  find  yourself  encumbered  with  a  young 
lady,  a  princess  too,  all  of  whose  relatives  and  vas- 
sals have  been  slaughtered  on  your  account,  and 
who  naturally  expects  you  to  share  her  throne.  In 
a  moment  of  abstraction  you  consent  to  the  ar- 
rangement, and  are  married  by  an  archbishop  in 
partibus  who  happens  to  be  on  the  spot.  As  your 
late  royal  rival  has  slain  all  your  late  father-in-law's 
lieges,  and  you  have  done  the  same  service  for  him 
in  turn,  there  are  no  adventures  left  in  this  part 
of  the  world.     Luckily,  before  the  wedding-ring  is 

54 


THE   METRICAL  ROMANCES 

warm  on  your  finger,  a  plesiosaurus  turns  up.  This 
saves  many  disagreeable  explanations  with  the 
bride,  whom  you  are  resolved  to  have  nothing  to 
do  with  while  the  other  young  lady  is  alive.  You 
settle  her  comfortably  on  the  throne  of  her  depopu- 
lated kingdom,  slay  the  monster,  and  start  for  home 
with  your  revered  parent.  There  you  overcome 
the  usurping  Earl,  reinstate  your  father,  and  assist 
cheerfully  at  the  burning  of  your  mother  for  big- 
amy; your  filial  piety  being  less  strong  than  your 
reverence  for  the  laws  of  your  country.  A  fairy 
who  has  a  particular  interest  in  you  (and  who,  it 
seems,  is  your  real  mother,  after  all  —  a  fact  which 
relieves  your  mind  of  any  regrets  on  the  score  of 
the  late  melancholy  bonfii-e),  lets  you  into  the  secret 
that  ladye-love  the  first  is  your  own  sister.  This 
revives  your  affection  for  your  wife,  and  you  go 
back  to  the  kingdom  of  Gombraunt,  find  her  re- 
duced to  extremities  by  another  matrimonial  Sol- 
dan,  whom  you  incontinently  massacre  with  all  his 
giants,  and  now  at  last  a  prospect  of  quiet  domestic 
life  seems  to  open.  Dull,  peaceful  days  follow,  and 
you  begin  to  take  desponding  views  of  life,  when 
your  ennui  is  pleasantly  broken  in  upon  by  a  mon- 
ster who  combines  in  himself  all  the  monstrosities 
of  heraldic  zoology.  You  decapitate  him  and  in- 
cautiously put  one  of  his  teeth  in  your  boot  as  a 

55 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

keepsake.  A  scratch  ensues,  physicians  are  in  vain, 
and  you  die  with  an  edifying  piety,  deeply  regretted 
by  your  subjects,  if  there  are  any  left  with  their 
heads  on. 

On  the  whole,  we  may  think  ourselves  happy  that 
we  live  under  somewhat  different  institutions. 


56 


LECTURE   IV 

THE   BALLADS 

{Friday  Evening,  January  19,  1855) 


IV 


ONE  of  the  laws  of  the  historical  Macbeth  de- 
clares that  "  Fools,  minstrels,  bards,  and  all 
other  such  idle  people,  unless  they  be  specially 
licensed  by  the  King,  shall  be  compelled  to  seek 
some  craft  to  win  their  living,"  and  the  old  chron- 
icler adds  approvingly,  "  These  and  such-like  laws 
were  used  by  King  Macbeth,  through  which  he 
governed  the  realm  ten  years  in  good  justice." 

I  do  not  quote  this  in  order  to  blacken  the  mem- 
ory of  that  unhappy  monarch.  The  poets  com- 
monly contrive  to  be  even  with  their  enemies  in 
the  end,  and  Shakspeare  has  taken  an  ample  re- 
venge. I  cite  it  only  for  the  phrase  unless  they  he 
specially  licensed  hy  the  King,  which  points  to  a 
fact  on  which  I  propose  to  dwell  for  a  few  mo- 
ments before  entering  upon  my  more  immediate 
object. 

When  Virgil  said,  "  Arma  virumque  cano,"  "  Arms 
and  the  man  I  sing,"  he  defined  in  the  strictest  man- 
ner the  original  office  of  the  poet,  and  the  object  of 
the  judicious  Macbeth's  ordinance  was  to  prevent 

59 


LECTUEES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

auy  one  from  singing  the  wi'ong  arms  and  the  rival 
man.  Formerly  the  poet  held  a  recognized  place 
in  the  body  politic,  and  if  he  has  been  deposed 
from  it,  it  mav  be  some  consolation  to  think  that 
the  Fools,  whom  the  Scottish  usurper  included  in 
his  penal  statute,  have  not  lost  their  share  in  the 
government  of  the  world  yet,  nor,  if  we  may  trust 
appearances,  are  likely  to  for  some  time  to  come. 
But  the  Fools  here  referred  to  were  not  those  who 
had  least,  but  those  who  had  most  wit,  and  who 
assumed  that  disguise  in  order  to  take  away  any 
dangerous  appearance  of  intention  from  their  jibes 
and  satires. 

The  poet  was  once  what  the  political  newspaper 
is  now,  and  circulated  from  ear  to  ear  with  satire 
or  panegyric.  He  it  was  who  first  made  public 
opinion  a  power  in  the  State  by  condensing  it 
into  a  song.  The  invention  of  printing,  by  weak- 
ening the  faculty  of  memory,  and  by  transferring 
the  address  of  language  from  the  ear  to  the  eye, 
has  lessened  the  immediate  power  of  the  poet.  A 
newspaper  may  be  suppressed,  an  editor  may  be 
silenced,  every  copy  of  an  obnoxious  book  may  be 
destroyed,  but  in  those  old  days  when  the  minstrels 
were  a  power,  a  verse  could  wander  safely  from 
heart  to  heart  and  from  hamlet  to  hamlet  as  unas- 
sailable as  the  memories  on  which  it  was  imprinted. 

60 


THE   BALLADS 

Its  force  was  in  its  impersoDality,  for  public  opinion 
is  disenclianted  the  moment  it  is  individualized,  and 
is  terrible  only  so  long  as  it  is  the  opinion  of  no  one 
in  particular.  Find  its  author,  and  the  huge  shadow 
which  but  now  darkened  half  the  heaven  shrinks 
like  the  genius  of  the  Arabian  story  into  the  com- 
pass of  a  leaden  casket  which  one  can  hold  in  his 
hand.  Nowadays  one  knows  the  editor,  perhaps, 
and  so  is  on  friendly  terms  with  public  opinion. 
You  may  have  dined  with  it  yesterday,  rubbed 
shoulders  with  it  in  the  omnibus  to-day,  nay,  car- 
ried it  in  your  pocket  embodied  in  the  letter  of  the 
special  correspondent. 

Spenser,  in  his  prose  tract  upon  Ireland,  has  left 
perhaps  the  best  description  possible  of  the  primi- 
tive poet  as  he  was  everywhere  when  the  copies  of 
a  poem  were  so  many  living  men,  and  all  publica- 
tion was  to  the  accompaniment  of  music.  He  says : 
"There  is  amongst  the  Irish  a  certain  kind  of 
people  called  bards,  which  are  to  them  instead  of 
poets,  whose  profession  is  to  set  forth  the  praises 
or  dispraises  of  men  in  their  poems  or  rhythms; 
the  which  are  held  in  such  high  regard  or  esteem 
amongst  them  that  none  dare  to  displease  them  for 
fear  of  running  into  reproach  through  this  offense, 
and  to  be  made  infamous  in  the  mouths  of  all  men." 

Nor  was  the  sphere  of  the  bards  confined  to  the 

Gl 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

present  alone.  They  were  also  the  embodied  mem- 
ory of  the  people.  It  was  on  the  wings  of  vei'se  that 
the  names  of  ancestral  heroes  could  float  down  se- 
curely over  broad  tracts  of  desert  time  and  across 
the  gulfs  of  oblivion.  And  poets  were  sometimes 
made  use  of  by  sagacious  rulers  to  make  legends 
serve  a  political  purpose.  The  Persian  poet  Firdusi 
is  a  remarkable  instance  of  this.  Virgil  also  at- 
tempted to  braid  together  the  raveled  ends  of  Ro- 
man and  Greek  tradition,  and  it  is  not  impossible 
that  the  minstrels  of  the  Norman  metrical  romances 
were  guided  by  a  similar  instinct. 

But  the  position  of  the  inhabitants  of  England 
was  a  peculiar  one.  The  Saxons  by  their  conver- 
sion to  Christianity,  and  the  Normans  still  more  by 
their  conversion  and  change  of  language,  were  al- 
most wholly  cut  off  from  the  past.  The  few  frag- 
ments of  the  Celtic  race  were  the  only  natives  of 
Britain  who  had  an  antiquity.  The  English  properly 
so  called  were  a  people  who  hardly  knew  their  own 
grandfathers.  They  no  longer  spoke  the  language, 
believed  in  the  religion,  or  were  dominated  by  the 
ideas  of  their  ancestors. 

/  English  writers  demand  of  us  a  national  litera- 
ture. But  where  for  thirteen  centuries  was  their 
own  ?  Our  ancestors  brought  a  past  with  them  to 
Plymouth ;  they  claimed  descent  from  a  great  race ; 

62 


%  THE   BALLADS 

the  language  they  spoke  had  been  ennobled  by  re- 
cordmg  the  trinmphs  of  ancestral  daring  and  genius; 
it  had  gone  up  to  Heaven  wafted  on  the  red  wings 
of  martyr-fires ;  mothers  hushed  their  new-born 
babes,  and  priests  scattered  the  farewell  earth  upon 
the  cotfin-lid,  with  words  made  sweet  or  sacred  by 
immemorial  association.  But  the  Normans  when 
they  landed  in  England  were  a  new  i-ace  of  armed 
men  almost  as  much  cut  off  from  the  influences  of 
the  past  as  those  which  sprang  out  of  the  ground 
at  the  sowing  of  the  dragon's  teeth.  They  found 
there  a  Saxon  encampment  occupying  a  country 
strange  to  them  also.  For  we  must  remember 
that  though  Britain  was  historically  old,  Eng- 
land was  not ;  and  it  was  as  impossible  to  piece  the 
histories  of  the  two  together  to  make  a  national 
record  of  as  it  would  be  for  us  to  persuade  our- 
selves into  a  feeling  of  continental  antiquity  by 
adopting  the  Mexican  annals. 

The  ballads  are  the  first  truly  national  jDoetry  in 
our  language,  and  national  poetry  is  not  either  that 
of  the  drawing-room  or  of  the  kitchen.  It  is  the 
common  mother-earth  of  the  universal  sentiment 
that  the  foot  of  the  poet  must  touch,  through 
which  shall  steal  up  to  heart  and  brain  that  fine 
virtue  which  puts  him  in  sympathy,  not  with  his 
class,  but  with  his  kind. 

63 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

Fortunately  for  the  ballad-makers,  they  were  not 
eucimibered  with  any  useless  information.  They 
had  not  wit  enough  to  lose  their  way.  It  is  only 
the  greatest  brains  and  the  most  intense  imagina- 
tion that  can  fuse  learning  into  one  substance  with 
their  own  thought  and  feeling,  and  so  interpene- 
trate it  with  themselves  that  the  acquired  is  as  much 
thef/  as  the  native.  The  ballad-makers  had  not  far 
to  seek  for  material.  The  shipwreck,  the  runaway 
match,  the  unhappy  marriage,  the  village  ghost,  the 
achievement  of  the  border  outlaw  —  in  short,  what 
we  read  every  day  under  the  head  of  Items  in  the 
newspapers,  were  the  inspiration  of  their  song. 
And  they  sang  well,  because  they  thought,  and  felt, 
and  believed  just  as  their  hearers  did,  and  because 
they  never  thought  anything  about  it.  The  ballads 
are  pathetic  because  the  poet  did  not  try  to  make 
them  so;  and  they  are  models  of  nervous  and  simple 
diction  because  the  business  of  the  poet  was  to  tell 
his  story,  and  not  to  adorn  it ;  and  accordingly  he 
w^ent  earnestly  and  straightforwardly  to  work,  and 
let  the  rapid  thought  snatch  the  word  as  it  ran, 
feeling  quite  sure  of  its  getting  the  right  one.  The 
only  art  of  expression  is  to  have  something  to  ex- 
press. We  feel  as  wide  a  difference  between  what 
is  manufactured  and  what  is  spontaneous  as  be- 
tween the  sparkles  of  an  electrical  machine,  which 

64 


THE  BALLADS 

a  sufficiently  muscular  professor  can  grind  out  by 
the  dozen,  aud  the  wildfire  of  God  that  writes 
7nene,  mene,  on  the  crumbling  palace  walls  of  mid- 
night cloud. 

It  seems  to  me  that  the  ballad-maker,  in  respect 
of  diction,  had  also  this  advantage — that  he  had  no 
books.  Language,  when  it  speaks  to  the  eye  only, 
loses  half  its  meaning.  For  the  eye  is  an  outpost 
of  the  brain,  and  wears  its  livery  oftener  than  that 
of  the  character.  But  the  temperament,  the  deep 
human  nature,  the  aboriginal  emotions,  these  utter 
themselves  in  the  voice.  It  is  only  by  the  ear  that 
the  true  mother-tongue  that  knows  the  short  way 
to  the  heart  is  learned.  I  do  not  believe  that  a  man 
born  deaf  could  understand  Shakspeare,  or  sound 
anything  but  the  edges  and  shores  of  Lear's  tem- 
pestuous woe.  I  think  that  the  great  masters  of 
speech  have  hunted  men  and  not  libraries,  and 
have  found  the  secret  of  their  })Ower  in  the  street 
and  not  upon  the  shelf. 

It  is  the  waij  of  saying  things  that  is  learned  by 
commerce  with  men,  and  the  best  writers  have 
mixed  much  with  the  world.  It  is  there  only  that 
the  language  of  feeling  can  be  acquired. 

The  ballads  are  models  of  narrative  poetry. 
They  are  not  concerned  with  the  utterance  of 
thought,  but  only  of  sentiment  or  passion,  and  it  is 

5  65 


LECTURES   ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

as  illustrating  poetic  diction  that  I  shall  chiefly  cite 
them.  If  they  moralize  it  is  always  by  picture,  and 
not  by  preachment.  What  discourse  of  inconstancy 
has  the  force  and  biting  pathos  of  this  grim  old 
song,  the  "  Twa  Corbies  "  f 

As  I  was  walking  all  aloue 

I  heard  twa  corbies  making  a  moan. 

The  one  unto  the  other  did  say  : 

Where  shall  we  gang  and  dine  to-day  ? 

In  beyond  that  old  turf  dyke 

I  wot  there  lies  a  new-slain  knight, 

And  naebody  kens  that  he  lies  there, 

But  his  hawk  and  his  hound  and  his  lady  fair. 

His  hound  is  to  the  hunting  gone, 

His  hawk  to  fetch  the  wild-fowl  hame, 

His  lady 's  ta'en  anither  mate  — 

Sae  we  may  make  our  dinner  sweet. 

You  '11  sit  upon  his  white  neck-bone 

And  I  '11  pick  out  his  bonny  blue  een ; 

With  a  lock  of  his  golden  hair 

We  '11  thatch  our  nest  when  it  grows  bare. 

Many  a  one  for  him  makes  moan, 

But  none  sail  ken  where  he  is  gone ; 

O'er  his  white  bones  when  they  grow  bare 

The  wind  shall  blow  forever  mair. 

Observe,  the  wind  simply  blow^s.  That  is  enough; 
but  a  modern  poet  would  have  sought  to  intensify 

66 


THE   BALLADS 

by  making  the  wind  moan,  or  shriek,  or  sob,  or 
something  of  the  kind. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  quoted  a  ballad  which  tells  a 
story  of  a  child-murder.     It  begins  : 

Fair  Anne  sate  in  her  bower 

Down  by  the  greenwood  side, 
And  the  flowers  did  spring, 
And  the  birds  did  sing, 

'T  was  the  pleasant  Mayday  tide. 

The  ballad  singers  had  all  the  advantage  of  that 
spur  of  the  moment  which  the  excitement  of  speak- 
ing gives,  and  they  also  received  the  magnetism 
which  came  from  the  sympathy  of  their  hearers. 
They  knew  what  toldi  for  they  had  their  hand  uj^on 
the  living  pulse  of  feeling.  There  was  no  time  to 
palaver;  they  must  come  to  the  point. 

The  Percy  came  out  of  Northumberland, 

And  a  vow  to  God  made  he 
That  he  would  hunt  in  the  mountains 

Of  Cheviot  within  days  three. 
In  the  maugre  of  Doughty  Douglas 

And  all  that  ever  with  him  be. 

They  plunge  into  deejD  water  at  once.  And  there 
is  never  any  filling  up.  The  transitions  are  abrupt. 
You  can  no  more  foretell  the   swift  wheel  of  the 

67 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

feeling  than  that  of  a  falcon,  and  the  phrases  flash 
forth  sharp-edged  and  deadly  like  a  sword  drawn 
in  wrath.  The  passions  speak  out  savagely  and 
without  any  delicacies  of  circumlocution. 

It  is  worth  thinking  of  whether  the  press,  which 
we  have  a  habit  of  calling  such  a  fine  institution, 
be  not  weakening  the  fibre  and  damaging  the  sin- 
cerity of  our  English  and  our  thinking,  quite  as 
fast  as  it  diffuses  intelligence. 

Consider  the  meaning  of  expression  —  something 
wrung  from  us  by  the  grip  of  thought  or  passion, 
whether  we  will  or  no.  But  the  editor  is  quite  as 
often  compelled  to  write  that  he  may  fill  an  empty 
column  as  that  he  may  relieve  an  overfilled  brain. 
And  in  a  country  like  ours,  where  newspapers  are 
the  only  reading  of  the  mass  of  the  people,  there  is  a 
danger  of  a  general  contentedness  in  commonplace. 
For  we  always  become  what  we  habitually  read. 
We  let  our  newspapers  think  for  us,  argue  for  us, 
criticize  for  us,  remember  for  us,  do  everything  for 
us,  in  short,  that  will  save  us  from  the  misfortune  of 
being  ourselves.  And  so,  instead  of  men  and  women, 
we  find  ourselves  in  a  world  inhabited  by  incar- 
nated leaders,  or  paragraphs,  or  items  of  this  or 
that  journal.  We  are  apt  to  wonder  at  the  scholar- 
ship of  the  men  of  two  centuries  ago.  They  were 
scholars  because  they  did  not  read  so  much  as  we 

68 


THE   BALLADS 

do.  We  spend  more  time  over  print  than  they  did, 
but  instead  of  communing  with  the  choice  thought 
of  choice  spirits,  and  insensibly  acquiring  the  grand 
manner  of  that  supreme  society,  we  dihgently  in- 
form ourselves  of  such  facts  as  that  a  fine  horse 
belonging  to  Mr.  Smith  ran  away  on  Wednesday 
and  that  a  son  of  Mr.  Brown  fell  into  the  canal  on 
Thursday,  or  that  a  gravel  bank  fell  in  and  buried 
Patrick  O'Callahan  on  Friday.  And  it  is  our  own 
fault,  and  not  that  of  the  editor.  For  we  make  the 
newspapers,  and  the  editor  would  be  glad  to  give  us 
better  stuff  if  we  did  not  demand  such  as  this. 

Another  evil  of  this  state  of  things  is  the  water- 
ing, or  milk-and-watering,  of  our  English.  Writing 
to  which  there  is  no  higher  compelling  destiny  than 
the  coming  of  the  printer's  devil  must  end  in  this 
at  last.  The  paragraphist  must  make  his  paragraph, 
and  the  longer  he  makes  it,  the  better  for  him  and 
the  worse  for  us.  The  virtue  of  words  becomes 
wholly  a  matter  of  length.  Accordingly,  we  have 
now  no  longer  any  fires,  but  "  disastrous  conflagra- 
tions"; nobody  dies,  but  "deceases"  or  "demises"; 
men  do  not  fall  from  houses,  but  are  "  precipitated 
from  mansions  or  edifices  ";  a  convict  is  not  hanged, 
but  "  suffers  the  extreme  penalty  of  the  offended 
law,"  etc. 

The   old  ballad-makers   lived  in   a  better  day. 

5*  69 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

They  did  not  hear  of  so  many  events  that  none  of 
them  made  any  hnpression.  They  did  not  live,  as 
we  do,  in  a  world  that  seems  a  great  ear  of  Diony- 
sius,  where  if  a  scandal  is  whispered  in  Pekin  we 
hear  of  it  in  New  York.  The  minstrels  had  no 
metaphysical  bees  in  their  bonnets.  They  did  not 
speculate  about  this  world  or  the  next.  They  had 
not  made  the  great  modern  discovery  that  a  bird  in 
a  bush  is  worth  two  in  the  hand.  They  did  not 
analyze  and  refine  till  nothing  genuine  was  left  of 
this  beautiful  world  but  an  indigestion. 

The  ballads  neither  harangue  nor  describe ;  but 
only  state  things  in  the  least  complex  way.  Those 
old  singers  caught  language  fresh  and  with  a  flavor 
of  the  soil  in  it  still,  and  their  hearers  were  people 
of  healthy  sensibilities  who  must  be  hit  directly 
and  hard.  Accordingly,  there  is  a  very  vigorous 
handling.  They  speak  bliuitly  and  to  the  purpose. 
If  a  maiden  loses  her  lover,  she  merely 

Turns  her  face  unto  the  wall 
And  there  her  heart  it  breaks. 

A  modern  poet  would  have  hardly  thrown  away 
the  opportunity  offered  him  for  describing  the 
chamber  and  its  furniture;  he  would  put  a  painted 
window  into  it  —  for  the  inkstand  will  supply  them 

70 


THE  BALLADS 

quite  as  cheaply  as  plain  glass.  He  would  tell  you 
all  about  the  tapestry  which  the  eyes  of  the  dying 
maiden  in  her  extreme  agony  would  have  been 
likely,  of  course,  to  have  been  minutely  interested 
in.  He  would  have  given  a  clinical  lecture  on  the 
symptoms,  and  a  post-mortem  examination.  It 
was  so  lucky  for  those  old  ballad-mongers  that  they 
had  not  any  ideas !  And  when  they  give  a  dying 
speech  they  do  not  make  their  heroes  take  leave  of 
the  universe  in  general  as  if  that  were  going  into 
mourning  for  a  death  more  or  less. 

When  Earl  Douglas  is  in  his  death-thraw,  he 
says  to  his  nephew: 

My  wound  is  deep  ;  I  fain  would  sleep ; 

Take  thou  the  vanguard  of  the  three. 
And  hide  me  by  the  brakenbush 

That  grows  on  yonder  lily  lee. 
O  bury  me  by  the  brakenbush 

Beneath  the  blooming  brere. 
Let  never  living  mortal  ken 

That  a  kindly  Scot  lies  here. 

The  Ijallads  are  the  only  true  folk-songs  that  we 
have  in  English.  There  is  no  other  poetry  in  the 
language  that  addresses  us  so  simply  as  mere  men 
and  women.     Learning  has  tempered  with  modern 

71 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

poetry,  and  the  Muse,  like  Portia,  wears  a  doctor's 
cap  and  gown. 

The  force  and  earnestness  of  style  that  mark  the 
old  ballad  become  very  striking  when  contrasted 
with  later  attempts  in  the  same  way.  It  is  not 
flatness  and  insipidity  that  they  are  remarkable 
for,  but  for  a  bare  rocky  grandeur  in  whose  crevices 
tenderness  nestles  its  chance  tufts  of  ferns  and 
harebells.  One  of  these  sincere  old  verses  imbedded 
in  the  insipidities  of  a  modern  imitation  looks  out 
stern  and  colossal  as  that  charcoal  head  which 
Michael  Angelo  drew  on  the  wall  of  the  Farnesina 
glowers  through  the  paling  frescoes. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  read  a  number  of  passages  from 
the  old  ballad  entitled  "Margaret's  Ghost,"  and 
compared  them  with  a  few  stanzas  from  an  "im- 
proved "  version  of  the  same  by  Mallet.  He  also 
read  from  the  ballad  of  "Helen  of  Kirkconnell,"  and 
from  others. 

Of  the  tenderness  of  the  ballads  I  must  give  an 
instance  or  two  before  I  leave  them.  In  the  old 
ballad  of  "Clerk  Saunders,"  Margaret  follows  the 
ghost  of  her  lover  to  his  grave. 

So  painfully  she  climbed  the  wall, 
She  climbed  the  wall  up  after  him, 

Hose  nor  shoon  upon  her  feet, 
She  had  no  time  to  put  them  on. 

72 


THE  BALLADS 

O  bonny,  bonny,  sang  the  bird 

Sat  on  a  coil  o'  hay, 
But  mournfu',  mournfu',  was  the  maid 

That  followed  the  corpse  o'  clay. 

Is  there  any  room  at  your  head,  Saunders  ? 

Or  any  room  at  your  feet ! 
Is  there  any  room  at  your  side,  Saunders  ? 

For  fain,  fain  I  would  sleep. 

She  's  sat  her  down  upon  the  grave 
And  mourued  sae  lang  and  sair 

That  the  clochs  and  wanton  flies  at  last 
Came  and  built  in  her  yellow  hair. 

In  further  illustration  Mr.  Lowell  read  from  the 
"Clerk's  Two  Sons  of  Oxenford."  He  concluded  his 
lecture  thus: 

I  think  that  the  makers  of  the  old  ballads  did 
stand  face  to  face  with  life  in  a  way  that  is  getting 
more  and  more  impossible  for  us.  Day  by  day  the 
art  of  printing  isolates  us  more  and  more  from  our 
fellows  and  from  the  healthy  and  inspiring  touch 
of  our  fellows.  We  continually  learn  more  and 
more  of  mankind  and  less  of  man.  We  know  more 
of  Europe  than  of  our  own  village.  We  feel  hu- 
manity from  afar. 

But   I   must  not   forget   that   the   ballads   have 

73 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

passed  through  a  sieve  which  no  modern  author 
has  the  advantage  of.  Only  those  have  come  down 
to  us  which  imprinted  themselves  on  the  general 
heart.  The  new  editions  were  struck  off  by  mothers 
crooning  their  children  to  sleep,  or  by  wandering 
minstrels  who  went  about  sowing  the  seeds  of 
courtesy  and  valor  in  the  cottage  and  on  the  hill- 
side. Print,  which,  like  the  amber,  preserves  all  an 
author's  grubs,  gives  men  the  chance  to  try  him  by 
the  average,  rather  than  the  best,  of  his  yield. 

Moreover,  the  Review  of  the  ballad-singer  was  in 
the  faces  of  his  ring  of  hearers,  in  whose  glow  or 
chill  he  could  read  at  a  glance  a  criticism  from 
which  there  was  no  appeal.  It  was  not  Smith  or 
Brown,  but  the  human  heart  that  judged  him. 

Doubtless  another  advantage  of  these  old  poets 
was  their  out-of-door  life.  They  went  from  audi- 
ence to  audience  on  foot,  and  had  no  more  cramped 
a  study  than  the  arch  of  heaven,  no  library  but 
clouds,  streams,  mountains,  woods,  and  men.  There 
is  something  more  in  sunshine  than  mere  light  and 
heat.  I  fancy  that  a  kind  of  flavor  we  detect  in 
the  old  ballads  is  due  to  it,  and  that  it  may  give 
color  and  bloom  to  the  brain  as  well  as  to  the  apple 
and  i:>lum.  Indoor  inspiration  is  like  the  stove-heat 
of  the  forcing-house,  and  the  fruits  ripened  by  it 
are  pale,  dropsical,  and  wanting  in  tang.      There 

74 


THE   BALLADS 

may  be  also  a  virtue  in  the  fireside  wliicli  gives  to 
the  Northern  wind  a  domestic  and  family  warmth, 
and  makes  it  skilled  to  teach  the  ethics  of  home. 
But  it  is  not  to  the  chimney-corner  that  we  can 
trace  the  spiritual  dynasties  that  have  swayed  man- 
kind.    These  have  sunshine  in  their  veins. 

Perhaps  another  charm  of  these  ballads  is  that  no- 
body made  them.  They  seem  to  have  come  up  like 
violets,  and  we  have  only  to  thank  God  for  them. 
And  we  imply  a  sort  of  fondness  when  we  call 
them  "old."  It  is  an  epithet  we  give  endearingly 
and  not  as  supposing  any  decrepitude  or  senescence 
in  them.  Like  all  true  poetry,  they  are  not  only 
young  themselves,  but  the  renewers  of  youth  in 
us ;  they  do  not  lose,  but  accumulate,  strength  and 
life.  A  true  poem  gets  a  part  of  its  inspiring  force 
from  each  generation  of  men.  The  great  stream  of 
Homer  rolls  down  to  us  out  of  the  past,  swollen 
with  the  tributary  delight  and  admiration  of  the 
ages.  The  next  generation  will  find  Shakspeare 
fuller  of  meaning  and  energy  by  the  addition  of 
our  enthusiasm.  Sir  Philip  Sidney's  admiration  is 
part  of  the  breath  that  sounds  through  the  trumpet 
of  "Chevy  Chase."  That  is  no  empty  gift  with 
which  we  invest  a  poem  when  we  bestow  on  it  our 
own  youth,  and  it  is  no  small  debt  we  owe  the  true 
poem  that  it  preserves  for  us  some  youth  to  bestow. 

75 


LECTUEE    V 

CHAUCER 

{Tuesday  Evening^  January  23,  1855) 


*   ' 


V 


TT  is  always  a  piece  of  good  fortune  to  be  the  ear- 
liest acknowledged  poet  of  any  country.  We 
prize  the  first  poems  as  we  do  snowdrops,  not  only 
for  their  own  intrinsic  beauty,  but  even  more  for 
that  force  of  heart  and  instinct  of  sunshine  in  them 
which  brings  them  up,  where  grass  is  brown  and 
trees  are  bare,  the  outposts  and  forlorn  hopes  of 
spring.  There  never  comes  anything  again  like  a 
first  sensation,  and  those  who  love  Chaucer,  though 
they  may  have  learned  late  to  do  it,  cannot  help 
imaginatively  antedating  their  delight,  and  giving 
him  that  place  in  the  calendar  of  their  personal  ex- 
perience which  belongs  to  him  in  the  order  of  our 
poetic  history. 

And  the  feeling  is  a  true  one,  for  although  inten- 
sity be  the  great  characteristic  of  all  genius,  and 
the  power  of  the  poet  is  measured  by  his  ability  to 
renew  the  charm  of  freshness  in  what  is  outworn 
and  habitual,  yet  there  is  something  in  Chaucer 
which  gives  him  a  personal  property  in  the  epithet 

79 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

"  vernal,"  and  makes  him  seem  always  to  go  hand 
in  hand  with  May. 

In  our  New  England  especially,  where  May-day 
is  a  mere  superstition  and  the  Maypole  a  poor 
half-hardy  exotic  which  shivers  in  an  east  wind 
almost  as  sharp  as  Endicott's  axe, —  where  frozen 
children,  in  unseasonable  muslin,  celebrate  the 
floral  games  with  nosegays  from  the  milliner's,  and 
winter  reels  back,  like  shattered  Lear,  bringing  the 
dead  spring  in  his  arms,  her  budding  breast  and 
wan  dilustered  cheeks  all  overblown  with  the  drifts 
and  frostv  streaks  of  his  white  beard, —  where  even 
Chanticleer,  whose  sap  mounts  earliest  in  that 
dawn  of  the  year,  stands  dumb  beneath  the  drip- 
ping eaves  of  his  harem,  with  his  melancholy  tail 
at  half-mast, —  one  has  only  to  take  down  a  vol- 
ume of  Chaucer,  and  forthwith  he  can  scarce  step 
without  crushing  a  daisy,  and  the  sunshine  flickers 
on  small  new  leaves  that  throb  thick  with  song  of 
merle  and  mavis.  A  breath  of  spring  blows  out  of 
the  opening  lines  of  the  "Canterbury  Tales"  that 
seems  to  lift  the  hair  upon  our  brow : 

When  that  Aprile  with  his  showers  soote 
The  drought  of  March  hath  pierced  to  the  roote, 
And  bathed  every  vein  in  that  licour 
Of  whose  virtue  engendered  is  the  flour; 

80 


CHAUCER 

When  Zepliirus  eke  with  his  sweet  breath 
En  spired  hath  in  every  holt  and  heath 
The  tender  croppes ;  and  the  younge  sun 
Hath  in  the  Ram  half  of  his  course  yrun  ; 
And  little  fowles  maken  melodie, 
That  slepen  all  the  night  with  open  eye, 
So  nature  pricketh  them  in  their  courages. 

Even  Shakspeare,  who  comes  after  everybody  has 
done  his  best  and  seems  to  say,  "  Here,  let  me  take 
hold  a  minute  and  show  you  how  to  do  it,"  could 
not  mend  that.  With  Chaucer,  the  sun  seems 
never  to  have  run  that  other  half  of  his  course  in 
the  Ram,  but  to  have  stood  still  there  and  made 
one  long  spring-day  of  his  life. 

Chaucer  was  probably  born  in  1328,  seven  years 
after  the  death  of  Dante,  and  he  certainly  died  in 
1400,  having  lived  consequently  seventy-two  years. 
Of  his  family  we  know  nothing.  He  was  educated 
either  at  Oxford  or  Cambridge,  or  at  neither  of 
these  famous  universities.  He  was,  perhaps,  a  stu- 
dent at  the  Inner  Temple,  on  the  books  of  which 
a  certain  phantasmagoric  Mr.  Buckley  had  read  a 
record  that  "  Geoffrey  Chaucer  was  fined  two  shil- 
lings for  beating  a  Franciscan  friar  in  Fleet 
street." 

In  the  thirty-ninth  year  of  his  age  he  received 
from    Edward    III    a    pension    of    twenty    marks 

6  81 


^ 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

(equal  to  $1000  now),  and  afterwards  a  grant  of  a 
pitcher  of  wine  daily,  and  the  custody  of  a  ward 
which  gave  £104  a  year,  and  two  places  in  the  cus- 
toms. In  the  last  year  of  Edward  III  he  was  one 
of  three  envoys  sent  to  France  to  negotiate  a  mar- 
riage between  the  Prince  of  Wales  and  a  daughter 
of  the  French  King.  Richard  II  confirmed  his  pen- 
sion of  twenty  marks,  and  granted  him  another  of 
like  amount  instead  of  the  daily  wine. 

Chaucer  married  Philippa  Pycard  or  De  la  Roet, 
sister  of  Katherine  Swynford,  the  third  wife  of  John 
of  Gaunt.  By  this  connection  he  is  supposed  to 
have  become  a  favorer  of  Wycliffe's  doctrines,  and 
was  in  some  way  concerned  in  the  insurrection  of 
John  of  Northampton,  which  seems  to  have  had  for 
its  object  some  religious  reform.  He  was  forced 
to  fly  into  Holland,  and  is  said  to  have  made  his 
peace  at  last  by  betraying  his  companions.  I  think 
one's  historical  comfort  is  not  disturbed  by  refus- 
ing to  credit  this  story,  especially  as  it  stains  the 
fame  of  a  great  poet,  and,  if  character  may  ever 
be  judged  from  writings,  a  good  man.  We  may 
grant  that  he  broke  the  Franciscan  friar's  head  in 
Fleet  street,  if  it  were  only  for  the  alliteration,  but 
let  us  doubt  that  he  ever  broke  his  faith.  It  is  very 
doubtful  whether  he  was  such  stuff  as  martyrs  are 
made  of.    Plump  men,  though  nature  would  seem 

82 


CHAUCER 

to  have  marked  them  as  more  combustible,  seldom 
go  to  the  stake,  but  rather  your  lean  fellows,  who 
can  feel  a  fine  satisfaction  in  not  burning  well  to 
spite  the  Philistines. 

At  this  period  of  his  life  Chaucer  is  thought  to 
have  been  in  straitened  circumstances,  but  a  new 
pension  and  a  yearly  pipe  of  wine  were  granted 
him  by  Richard  II,  and  on  the  accession  of  Henry 
IV  these  were  confirmed,  with  a  further  pension 
of  forty  marks.  These  he  only  lived  a  year  to  en- 
joy, dying  October  25,  1400. 

The  most  poetical  event  in  Chaucer's  life  the  crit- 
ics have,  of  course,  endeavored  to  take  away  from 
us.  This  is  his  meeting  with  Petrarch,  to  which  he 
alludes  in  the  prologue  to  the  Clerk's  "  Tale  of  Grri- 
seldis."  There  is  no  reason  for  doubting  this  that 
I  am  able  to  discover,  except  that  it  is  so  pleasing 
to  think  of,  and  that  Chaucer  affirms  it.  Chaucer's 
embassy  to  Italy  was  in  1373,  the  last  year  of  Pe- 
trarch's life,  and  it  was  in  this  very  year  that  Pe- 
trarch first  read  the  "  Decameron."  In  his  letter  to 
Boccaccio  he  says :  "  The  touching  story  of  Griseldis 
has  been  ever  since  laid  up  in  my  memory  tliat  I 
may  relate  it  in  my  conversations  with  my  friends." 
We  are  forced  to  believe  so  many  things  that  ought 
never  to  have  happened  that  the  heart  ought  to  be 
allowed  to  recompense  itself  by  receiving  as  fact, 

83 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

without  too  close  a  scrutiny  of  the  evidence,  what- 
ever deserved  to  take  place  so  truly  as  this  did. 
Reckoning  back,  then,  by  the  finer  astronomy  of 
our  poetic  instinct,  we  find  that  a  conjunction  of 
these  two  stars  of  song  did  undoubtedly  occur  in 
that  far-off  heaven  of  the  Past. 

On  the  whole,  we  may  consider  the  life  of  Chaucer 
as  one  of  the  happiest,  and  also  the  most  fortunate, 
that  ever  fell  to  the  lot  of  poets.  In  the  course  of 
it  he  must  have  been  brought  into  relation  with  all 
ranks  of  men.  He  had  been  a  student  of  books,  of 
manners,  and  of  countries.  In  his  description  of 
the  Clerk  of  Oxford,  in  which  there  is  good  ground 
for  thinking  that  he  alludes  to  some  of  his  own 
characteristics,  he  says : 

For  hira  was  liefer  have  at  his  bed's  head 

A  twenty  books  clothed  in  black  or  red, 

Of  Aristotle  and  his  philosophy, 

Than  robes  rich,  or  fiddle  or  psaltery. 

But  albeit  that  he  was  a  philosopher. 

Yet  had  he  but  a  little  gold  in  coffer  ; 

Of  study  took  he  the  most  care  and  heed, 

Not  a  word  spake  he  more  than  there  was  need ; 

And  that  was  said  in  form  and  reverence, 

And  short  and  quick,  and  full  of  high  sentence ; 

Sounding  in  moral  virtue  was  his  speech, 

And  gladly  would  he  learn,  and  gladly  teach. 

84 


CHAUCER 

What  a  pleasant,  companionable  nature  the  last 
verse  testifies  to.  The  portrait  of  Chaucer,  too,  is 
perhaps  more  agreeable  than  that  of  any  other 
English  poet.  The  downcast,  meditative  eyes,  the 
rich  mouth,  and  the  beautiful  broad  brow  drooping 
with  the  weight  of  thought,  and  yet  with  an  eternal 
youth  and  freshness  shining  out  of  it  as  from  the 
morning  forehead  of  a  boy,  are  all  remarkable,  and 
their  harmony  with  each  other  in  a  placid  tender- 
ness not  less  so. 

Chaucer's  beginnings  as  an  author  were  transla- 
tions from  the  French  and  Italian.  Imitations  they 
should  rather  be  called,  for  he  put  Jimself  into  them, 
and  the  mixture  made  a  new  poem.  He  helped 
himself  without  scruple  from  every  quarter.  And, 
indeed,  there  is  nothing  more  clear  than  that  the 
great  poets  are  not  sudden  prodigies,  but  slow  re- 
sults. Just  as  an  oak  profits  by  the  foregone  lives 
of  immemorial  vegetable  races,  so  we  may  be  sure 
that  the  genius  of  every  remembered  poet  drew  the 
forces  that  built  it  up  from  the  decay  of  a  whole 
forest  of  forgotten  ones.  And  in  proportion  as  the 
genius  is  vigorous  and  original  will  its  indebtedness 
be ;  will  it  strike  its  roots  deeper  into  the  past  and 
into  remoter  fields  in  search  of  the  virtue  that  must 
sustain  it. 

Accordingly,  Chaucer,  like  Shakspeare,  invented 

6*  85 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH   POETRY 

almost  nothing.  Wherever  he  found  anything  di- 
rected to  Geoffrey  Chaucer  he  took  it  and  made  the 
most  of  it.  Indeed,  the  works  of  the  great  poets 
teach  us  to  hold  invention  somewhat  cheap.  The 
Provengal  rhymers  did  the  best  to  invent  things 
that  nobody  ever  thought  of  before,  and  they  suc- 
ceeded in  producing  what  nobody  ever  thought  of 
again.  He  must  be  a  very  great  poet  indeed  who 
can  afford  to  say  anything  new. 

In  the  great  poets  I  think  there  is  always  a  flavor 
of  race  or  country  which  gives  them  a  peculiar 
nearness  to  those  of  the  same  blood,  and  where  the 
face  of  the  individual  nature  is  most  marked,  it 
will  be  found  that  the  type  of  family  is  also  most 
deeply  stamped.  It  is  remarkable  that  Chaucer, 
who  probably  spoke  French  as  often  and  as  famil- 
iarly as  English,  who  levied  his  contributions  upon 
Norman,  Italian,  and  Latin  writers,  should  yet  have 
become  (with  an  exception)  the  most  truly  English 
of  our  poets. 

In  endeavoring  to  point  out  what  seem  to  be  the 
peculiar  characteristics  of  Chaucer,  I  think  we  shall 
find  one  of  the  chief  to  be  this — that  he  is  the  first 
poet  who  has  looked  to  nature  as  a  motive  of  con- 
scious emotion.  Accordingly,  his  descriptions  are 
always  simple  and  addressed  to  the  eye  rather  than 
to  the  mind,  or  to  the  fancy  rather  than  to  the  ima- 

86 


CHAUCER 

gination.  Very  often  lie  is  satisfied  with  giving  a 
list  of  flowers  with  no  epithet,  or  one  expressive 
of  color  or  perfume  only. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  read  a  number  of  passages  from 
the  "Assembly  of  Fowls"  and  other  poems  of 
Chaucer,  with  an  extract  from  Spenser. 

Now  I  observe  that  all  Chaucer's  epithets  are  pri- 
mary, or  such  as  give  birth  to  the  feeling ;  and  all 
Shakspeare's  secondary,  or  such  as  the  feeling  gives 
birth  to.  In  truth,  Shakspeare's  imagination  is 
always  dramatic,  even  in  his  narrative  poems,  and 
it  was  so  abundant  that  the  mere  overflow  of  it  has 
colored  the  very  well-springs  of  the  English  lan- 
guage, and  especially  of  English  poetry.  On  Chau- 
cer, nature  seems  to  have  always  smiled  (except  in 
winter,  which  he  cordially  hated),  and  no  rumor  of 
man's  fall  appears  to  have  reached  the  trees  and  \/ 
birds  and  flowers.  Nature  has  taken  to  thinking 
lately,  and  a  moral  jumps  up  out  of  a  blossom,  like 
a  jack-in-a-box. 

Another  characteristic  which  we  find  in  all  the 
poems  where  Chaucer  speaks  in  his  own  person  is 
a  sentiment  of  seclusion.  He  always  dreams  of 
walking  in  a  park  or  a  garden  walled-in  on  every 
side.  It  is  not  narrowness  but  privacy  that  he 
delights  in,  and  a  certain  feeling  of  generous  limi- 
tation.    In   this   his   poems   are   the  antithesis  of 

87 


/ 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

Milton's,  which  always  give  a  feeling  of  great 
spaces. 

In  description  it  would  be  hard  to  find  Chaucer's 
superior.  His  style  is  distinguished  always  hy  an 
energetic  simplicity,  which  is  a  combination  ex- 
ceedingly rare.  It  was  apparently  natural  to  him. 
But  when  he  is  describing  anything  that  he  loves, 
here  is  an  inexpressible  tenderness,  as  if  his  eyes 
filled  with  tears.  His  narrative  flows  on  like  one 
of  our  inland  rivers,  sometimes  hastening  a  little, 
and  in  its  eddies  seeming  to  run  sunshine ;  some- 
times lingering  smoothly,  while  here  and  there  a 
beautiful  quiet  thought,  a  pure  feeling,  a  golden- 
hearted  verse  opens  as  quietly  as  a  water-lily,  and 
makes  no  ripple.  In  modern  times  the  desire  for 
startling  expression  is  so  strong  that  people  hardly 
think  a  thought  is  good  for  anything  unless  it  goes 
off  with  a  2)0})  like  a  gingerbeer  (3ork. 

In  Chaucer's  pathetic  passages  (and  they  are 
many),  the  presence  of  pity  is  a  thing  to  be  noticed 
—  and  the  more  so  as  he  is  the  best  pathetic  story- 
teller among  the  English,  and,  except  Dante,  among 
the  modern  poets.  Chaucer,  when  he  comes  to  the 
sorrow  of  his  story,  seems  to  ci-oon  over  the 
thoughts,  and  soothe  them,  and  handle  them  with 
a  pleasant  compassionateness,  as  a  child  treats  a 
wounded  bird  which  he  cannot  make  up  his  heart 

88 


CHAUCER 

to  let  go,  and  yet  fears  to  close  his  fingers  too 
firmly  upon. 

Mr.  Lowell,  in  illustration,  read  from  the  "Man 
of  Law's  Tale,"  and  other  of  the  poems. 

What  I  have  said  of  Chaucer's  pathos  is  equally 
true  of  his  humor.  It  never  mvades  a  story,  but 
pervades  it.  It  circulates  through  all  his  comic 
tales  like  lively  blood,  and  never  puddles  on  the 
surface  any  unhealthy  spots  of  extravasation.  And 
this  I  take  to  be  the  highest  merit  of  narrative  — 
diffusion  without  diffuseness. 

I  have  not  spoken  yet  of  Chaucer's  greatest  work, 
the  "  Canterbury  Tales."  He  has  been  greatly  com- 
mended for  his  skill  in  the  painting  of  character, 
and,  indeed,  nothing  too  good  can  be  said  of  him  in 
this  respect.  Bnt  I  think  it  is  too  much  the  fash- 
ion to  consider  Chaucer  as  one  of  those  Flemish 
painters  who  are  called  realists  because  they  never 
painted  the  reality,  but  only  the  material  It  is  true 
that  Chaucer  is  as  minute  in  his  costume  as  if  he 
were  illuminating  a  missal.  Nothing  escapes  him — 
the  cut  of  the  beard,  the  color  of  the  jerkin,  the 
rustiness  of  the  sword.  He  could  not  help  this,  his 
eye  for  the  picturesque  is  so  quick  and  sure.  But 
in  drawing  the  character  it  is  quite  otherwise. 
Here  his  style  is  large  and  free,  and  he  emphasizes, 
but  not  too  strongly,  those  points  only  which  are 

89 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

essential,  and  which  give  variety  to  his  picture 
without  any  loss  to  the  keeping.  For  he  did  not 
forget  that  he  was  painting  history  and  not  a  por- 
trait. If  his  character  of  the  good  parson  (which 
still  stands  not  only  unmatched  but  unapproached 
by  the  many  later  attempts  at  the  same  thing) 
seem  an  exception,  it  is  yet  in  truth  a  confirmation 
of  what  I  have  said.  For,  in  this  case,  for  the  very 
sake  of  heeping,  it  was  necessary  to  be  more  full 
aiid  careful,  because  the  good  parson  alone  must 
balance  the  friar,  the  pardoner,  and  all  the  other 
clerical  personages  who  are  almost  unmixedly  evil. 
Justice  is  always  a  leading  quality  in  great  minds, 
and  by  this  single  figure  on  one  side  and  the  group 
on  the  other  Chaucer  satirizes  the  Church,  as  it 
can  only  be  satirized,  by  showing  that  it  contrasts 
with  that  true  religion  with  which  it  should  be 
identical.  And  was  there  ever  anything  so  happy 
as  Chaucer's  satire?  Commonly  satire  is  unhappy, 
but  Chaucer's  is  positively  more  kindly  than  the 
panegyric  of  some  poets. 

In  calling  Chaucer  genial  I  chose  the  word  with 
forethought.  This  geniality  made  it  impossible 
that  his  satire  should  be  intellectual.  The  satire  of 
the  intellect  deals  with  the  outside  only,  trying  the 
thing  satirized  by  a  rigid  standard.  But  it  results 
from   Chaucer's   genial   temperament   that  justice 

90 


CHAUCER 

in  him  is  so  equipoised  by  love  that  it  becomes 
mercy,  which  is  the  point  of  rest  between  absolute 
law  and  human  frailty.  Therefore  Chaucer,  prop- 
erly speaking,  is  not  a  satirist  but  a  humorist ;  in 
other  words,  his  satire  is  imaginative,  and  thus,  in 
perfect  subordination  to  narrative  (though  not  to 
dramatic)  art,  he  makes  his  characters  satirize 
themselves.  I  suppose  that  no  humorist  ever 
makes  anybody  so  thoroughly  an  object  of  satire 
as  himself  —  but  then  one  always  satirizes  himself 
kindly  because  he  sees  all  sides.  Falstaff  is  an  ex- 
ami)le  of  this.  Now  this  is  just  the  character  of 
imaginative  or  humorous  satire,  that  the  humorist 
enters  his  subject,  assumes  his  consciousness,  and 
works  wholly  from  within.  Accordingly  when 
Chaucer  makes  his  Frere  or  Pardoner  expose  all 
his  own  knaveries,  we  feel  not  as  if  he  said,  "  See 
what  a  precious  scamp  this  fellow  is,"  but  "  This  is 
the  way  ive  poor  devils  play  fantastic  tricks  before 
high  heaven."  The  butt  of  the  humorist  is  Man 
(including  himself  and  us) ;  the  butt  of  the  satirist 
is  always  individual  man.  The  humorist  says  ive; 
the  moralist  and  satirist,  thou.  Here  is  the  strength 
of  the  great  imaginative  satirist  of  modern  times, 
Mr.  Thackeray. 

In  satire,  the  antithesis  of  Chaucer  is  Pope  ;  as  a 
painter  of  life  and  manners,  Crabbe,  who  had  great 

91 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETEY 

powers  of  observation  without  imagination.  There- 
fore what  is  simplicity  in  Chaucer  is  poverty  in 
Crabbe. 

Chaucer  is  the  first  great  poet  who  held  up  a  mir- 
ror to  contemporary  life  in  its  objectivity,  and  for 
the  mere  sake  of  its  picturesqueness  —  that  is,  he  is 
the  first  great  poet  who  has  treated  To-day  as  if  it 
were  as  good  as  Yesterday.  Dante  wrote  life  also, 
but  it  was  his  own  life,  and  what  is  more,  his  own 
interior  life.  All  his  characters  are  represented  in 
their  relation  to  that.  But  Chaucer  reflected  life  in 
its  large  sense  — the  life  of  men.,  from  the  knight  to 
the  ploughman.  Thus  it  is  that  he  always  quietly 
and  naturally  rises  above  the  Conventional  into  the 
Universal.  And  so  his  great  poem  lives  forever  in 
that  perennial  contemporaneousness  which  is  the 
great  privilege  of  genius.  Thus  the  man  of  ge- 
nius has  a  double  immortality  —  in  heaven  and 
on  earth  at  the  same  time ;  and  this  is  what  makes 
it  good  to  he  a  genius  at  all,  that  their  beauty  and 
their  goodness  live  after  them,  and  every  genera- 
tion of  men  can  say  of  them  —  They  are  our  friends 
also. 

I  know  not  how  to  sum  up  what  we  feel  about 
Chaucer  except  by  saying,  what  would  have  pleased 
him  most,  that  we  love  him.     I  would  write  on  the 


92 


CHAUCER 

first  page  of  his  volume  the  inscription  which  he 
puts  over  the  gate  in  his  "Assembly  of  Fowls": 

Through  me  men  go  into  the  blissful  place 
Of  the  heart's  heal,  and  deadly  woundes  cure ; 
Through  me  men  go  into  the  welle  of  Grace, 
Where  green  and  lusty  May  shall  ever  endure. 
This  is  the  way  to  all  good  aventure ; 
Be  glad  thou  reader,  and  thy  sorrow  offcast. 
All  open  am  I,  pass  in,  and  liye  thee  fast. 


W.i 


LECTUKE   VI 

SPENSER 

{Friday  Evening,  Jannarij  26,  1855) 


VI 


CHAUCER  had  been  in  Ms  grave  one  hundred 
and  fifty  years  before  England  had  secreted 
choice  material  enough  to  produce  another  great 
poet.  Or,  perhaps,  we  take  it  for  granted  that  Na- 
ture understands  her  own  business  too  well  to  make 
such  productions  cheap.  Beauty,  we  know,  has  no 
charm  like  that  of  its  eternal  unexpectedness,  and 
the  best  delight  is  that  which  blossoms  from  a  stem 
of  bare  and  long  days.  ^ 

Or  is  it  that  the  spirit  of  man,  of  every  race  of 
men,  has  its  fatal  ebbs  and  floods,  its  oscillations 
between  the  fluid  ideal  and  the  soUd  matter-of-fact, 
so  that  the  doubtful  line  of  shore  between  is  in 
one  generation  a  hard  sandy  actuality,  with  only 
such  resemblances  of  beauty  as  a  dead  sea-moss 
here  and  there,  and  in  the  next  is  whelmed  with 
those  graceful  curves  of  ever-gaining,  ever-reced- 
ing foam,  and  that  dance  of  joyous  spray  which 
knows  not,  so  bright  is  it,  whether  it  be  sea  or 
sunshine. 

7  97 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

What  English  Poetry  was  between  Chaucer  and 
Spenser  there  is  no  need  to  say.  Scotland  had 
given  birth  to  two  or  three  poets  of  that  kind 
which  is  qualified  by  the  epithet  national,  which  is 
as  much  as  saying  that  they  took  account  only  of 
the  universe  to  the  north-northeast  corner  of  human 
nature  instead  of  the  whole  circumference  of  it. 
England  in  the  meanwhile  had  been  enriched  with 
Sternhold  and  Hopkins,  but  on  the  whole,  the  most 
important  event  between  the  death  of  Chaucer  and 
the  publication  of  the  "  Faery  Queene  "  was  the  in- 
troduction of  blank  verse.  Perhaps  the  blank  poetry 
suggested  it. 

Before  the  "  Faery  Queene,"  also,  two  long  poems 
were  printed  and  popular — the  "Mirror  for  Magis- 
trates," and  "Albion's  England."  How  the  first  of 
these  was  ever  read  it  is  hard  to  conceive,  unless 
we  accept  the  theory  of  some  theologians  that  our 
earth  is  only  a  kind  of  penal  colony  where  men  are 
punished  for  sins  committed  in  some  previous  state 
of  existence.  The  other  was  the  work  of  one  Warner, 
a  conveyancer,  and  has  a  certain  philological  value 
now  from  its  abounding  in  the  popular  phrases  of 
the  day.  It  is  worth  notice,  also,  as  containing  the 
most  perfect  example  in  the  English  language  of 
what  is  called  a  conceit.  It  occurs  in  his  account 
of  Queen  Elinor's  treatment  of  Fair  Rosamond : 

98 


SPENSER 

With  that  she  dashed  her  on  the  lips 

So  dyed  double  red ; 
Hard  was  the  heart  that  struck  the  blow, 

Soft  were  the  lips  that  bled. 

Which  is  nonsense  and  not  poetry,  though  Dr. 
Percy  admired  it.  Dr.  Donne,  and  the  poets  whom 
Dr.  Johnson  called  metaphysical  (as  if  all  poets 
are  not  so),  is  thought  to  be  full  of  conceits.  But 
the  essence  of  a  conceit  is  not  in  a  comparison 
being  far-fetched, —  the  imagination  can  make  fire 
and  water  friendly  when  it  likes,  — but  in  playing 
upon  the  meanings  of  two  words  where  one  is  taken 
in  a  metaphorical  sense.  This  is  a  mark  of  the 
superficial  mind  always;  whereas  Donne's  may  be 
called  a  subterficial  one,  which  went  down  to  the 
roots  of  thought  instead  of  playing  with  its 
blossoms. 

Not  long  after  the  "Faery  Queene"  were  pub- 
lished the  "  Polyolbion  "  of  Drayton,  and  the  "  Civil 
Wars  "  of  Daniel.  Both  of  these  men  were  respect- 
able poets  (especially  Drayton),  but  neither  of  them 
could  reconcile  poetry  with  gazetteering  or  chroni- 
cle-making. They  are  as  unlike  as  a  declaration  in 
love  and  a  declaration  in  law. 

This  was  the  period  of  the  Saurians  in  English 
Poetry,  interminable  poems,  book  after   book  and 


^ 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

canto  after  caDto,  like  far-stretching  verfeh'fE,  pro- 
digious creatures  that  rendered  the  earth  unfit  for 
the  dwelling  of  Man.  They  are  all  dead  now,  the  un- 
wieldy monsters — ichthyo-,  plesio-,  and  megalosauri 
— they  all  sleep  well,  and  their  huge  remains  are 
found  imbedded  in  those  vast  morasses,  the  "Col- 
lections of  the  Poets."  We  wonder  at  the  length  of 
face  and  general  atra-bilious  look  that  mark  the 
portraits  of  that  generation ;  but  it  is  no  marvel 
when  even  the  poetry  was  such  downright  hard 
work.  Poems  of  this  sort  might  have  served  to 
while  away  the  three-centuried  evening  of  ante- 
diluvian lives.  It  is  easy  to  understand  how  our 
ancestors  could  achieve  great  things  when  they  en- 
countered such  hardships  for  mere  amusement.  If 
we  agree  with  Horace  in  pitying  the  pre-Homeric 
heroes  because  they  were  without  poets,  we  may 
sincerely  commiserate  our  forefathers  of  that  gen- 
eration because  they  had  them.  The  reading  of 
one  of  these  productions  must  have  been  nearly  as 
long  a  business  as  the  taking  of  Troy,  and  deserved  a 
poet  to  sing  it.  Perhaps  fathers,  when  their  time  on 
earth  was  up,  folded  the  leaf  down  and  left  the  task 
to  be  finished  by  their  sons  —  a  dreary  inheritance. 

The  popularity  of  such  works  shows  the  insatiable 
thirst  of  the  human  soul  for  something  which  at 
least  tried  to  be  beyond  mere  matter-of-fact.     This 

100 


SPENSER        • 

thirst  for  the  ideal  transmuted  these  books  into 
poetry,  just  as  the  eternal  drought  of  the  desert 
turns  muddy  water  into  nectar,  and  the  famine  of 
the  shipwrecked  sailor  gives  a  flavor  beyond  French 
cookery  to  a  soup  made  of  old  shoes  {potafie  mix 
choujc).  But  meanwhile  Nature,  who  loves  surprises, 
was  quietly  preparing  a  noble  one.  A  new  poet  had 
been  born,  and  came  upon  that  arid  century  fresh 
and  dewy  as  out  of  the  first  dawn  that  waked  the 
birds  in  Eden.  A  great  poet  is  always  impossible — 
till  he  comes,  and  then  he  seems  the  simplest  tiling 
in  the  world  to  the  commentators.  He  got  this  no- 
tice here  and  the  other  there ;  similar  subjects  had 
been  treated  by  such  a  one,  and  the  metre  first 
used  by  another.  They  give  us  all  the  terms  of 
the  equation;  satisfy  us  that  a  plus  h  minus  c 
equals  x,  only  we  are  left  in  the  dark  as  to  what 
X  is.  The  genius  continues  to  be  an  unknown 
quantity.  The  great  poet  is  as  original  as  to-mor- 
row's sunrise,  which  will  take  the  old  clouds  and  va- 
pors, and  little  household  smokes  of  our  poor,  worn- 
out  earth  to  make  a  miracle  out  of,  and  transfigure 
the  old  hills  and  fields  and  houses  with  the  en- 
chantment of  familiar  novelty.  It  is  this  power  of 
being  at  once  familiar  and  novel  that  distingnishes 
the  primary  poets.  They  give  us  a  new  heaven 
and  a  new  earth  without  the  former  things  having 

7*  101 


/ 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

passed  away, —  whose  very  cliai'm  is  that  they  have 
uot, —  a  new  heaven  and  a  new  earth  that  we  can 
possess  by  the  fireside,  in  the  street,  and  the  count- 
ing-room. 

Edmund  Spenser  was  born,  like  Chaucer,  in  Lon- 
don, in  1558,  when  Cervantes  was  six  years  old. 
That  sixteenth  century  was  a  miraculous  one.  Scarce 
any  other  can  show  such  a  concurrence  of  great 
l)rains.  Mothers  must  have  expected  an  attack  of 
genius  among  their  children,  as  we  look  for  measles 
or  whooping-cough  now.  While  Spenser  was  yet 
delving  over  the  propria  qiice  marihis,  Shakspeare 
was  stretching  out  his  Ijaby  arms  and  trying  to  get 
the  moon  to  play  with,  and  the  little  Bacon,  chewing 
upon  his  coral,  had  already  learned  the  impenetra- 
bility of  matter.  It  almost  takes  one's  breath  away 
to  think  that  at  the  same  time  "  Hamlet "  and  the 
"  Novum  Organon "  were  at  the  mercy  of  teething 
and  the  scarlet  fever,  unless,  indeed,  destiny  takes 
care  to  lock  the  doors  against  those  child-stealing 
gypsies  when  she  leaves  such  precious  things  about. 

Of  Spenser's  personal  history  we  know  very  little. 
He  was  educated  at  Cambridge,  where  he  took  the 
degree  of  Master  of  Arts  in  1576.  He  is  supposed 
to  have  passed  the  three  following  years  with  some 
relations  in  the  country,  where  he  wrote  verses  and 
fell  in  love  with  a  lady  whom  he  calls  Rosalind,  and 

102 


SPENSER 

of  whom  wo  know  uothing  furthei*  unless  we  are 
satisfied  to  take  the  portrait  which  Shakspeare  has 
associated  forever  with  the  name  which  he  com- 
plimented by  adopting.  He  is  said  to  have  been 
employed  to  carry  a  despatch  or  two,  but  Lord 
Burleigh  did  not  fancy  him.  Poor  Lord  Burleigh  ! 
Sidney  and  Raleigh,  however,  were  luckier.  He 
was  recommended  to  the  great  queen,  and  received 
at  last  a  grant  of  Kilcolman  Castle  and  three  thou- 
sand acres  of  land  in  the  south  of  Ireland.  Here 
the  "  Faery  Queene  "  was  in  great  part  written.  At 
last  came  a  rebellion.  The  wild  kernes  and  gal- 
low-glasses  had  not  the  delicacy  of  the  Emathian 
conqueror,  and  they  burned  the  castle,  from  which 
Spenser  and  his  wife  with  two  of  their  children 
barely  escaped,  leaving  an  infant  to  perish  in  the 
flames.  Spenser  came  to  London  and  died  broken- 
hearted three  months  afterward,  on  the  16tli  of  Jan- 
uary, 1599.  That  rare  nature  was  like  a  Venice 
glass,  meant  only  to  mantle  with  the  wine  of  the 
sunniest  poetry.  The  first  drop  of  poisonous  sor- 
row shattered  it. 

In  1579  Spenser  published  the  "  Shepherd's  Cal- 
endar," a  series  of  twelve  eclogues,  one  for  each 
month  in  the  year.  In  these  poems  he  professedly 
imitated  Chaucer,  whom  he  called  his  master,  but 
without  much  success.    Even  with  the  light  reflected 

103 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

upon  them  from  the  lustre  of  his  great  poem,  one 
can  find  but  little  in  them  that  is  not  dull.  There 
are  indications  in  these  poems,  however,  here  and 
there,  of  a  nice  ear  for  harmony  in  verse. 

Spenser  was  the  pure  sense  of  the  Beautiful  put 
into  a  human  body  only  that  it  might  have  the 
means  of  communicating  with  men.  His  own  de- 
scription of  Clarion,  the  butterfly  in  his  "  Muiopot- 
mos,"  gives,  perhaps,  the  best  possible  idea  of  his 
own  character. 

Over  the  fields,  in  his  frauk  lustiness, 
And  all  the  champaign  o'er,  he  soared  light 

And  all  the  country  wide  he  did  possess. 
Feeding  upon  their  pleasures  bounteously. 
That  none  gainsay,  and  none  did  him  envy. 

The  woods,  the  rivers,  and  the  meadows  green. 
With  his  air-cutting  wings  he  measured  wide, 

Nor  did  he  leave  the  mountains  bare  unseen, 
Nor  the  rank  grassy  fens'  delights  untried ; 

But  none  of  these,  however  sweet  they  been, 
Mote  please  his  fancy,  or  him  cause  to  abide ; 

His  choiceful  sense  with  every  change  doth  flit, 

No  common  things  may  please  a  wavering  wit. 

To  the  gay  gardens  his  unstaid  desire 

Him  wholly  carried,  to  refresh  his  sprights ; 

There  lavish  Nature,  in  her  last  attire. 

Pours  forth  sweet  odors  and  alluring  sights; 

104 


SPENSER 

And  Art,  with  lier  contending,  doth  aspire 
To  excel  the  natural  with  made  delights. 
And  all  that  fair  or  pleasant  may  be  found, 
In  riotous  excess  doth  there  abound. 

There  he  arriving,  round  about  doth  flie. 
From  bed  to  bed,  from  one  to  the  other  border, 

And  takes  survey  with  curious  busy  eye, 
Of  every  flower  and  herb  there  set  in  order ; 

Now  this,  now  that,  he  tasteth  tenderly, 
Yet  none  of  them  he  rudely  doth  disorder ; 

He  with  his  feet  their  silken  leaves  displace. 

But  pastures  on  the  pleasures  of  each  place. 

And  evermore  with  most  variety 

And  change  of  sweetness  (for  all  change  is  sweet). 
He  casts  his  glutton  sense  to  satisfy, 

Now  sucking  of  the  sap  of  herbs  most  meet, 
Or  of  the  dew  which  yet  on  them  doth  lie, 

Now  in  the  same  bathing  his  tender  feet; 
And  then  he  percheth  on  some  branch  thereby 
To  weather  him,  and  his  moist  wings  to  dry. 

And  whatsoe'er  of  virtue  good  or  ill. 

Grew  in  his  garden  fetched  from  far  away. 

Of  every  one  he  takes  and  tastes  at  will. 
And  on  their  pleasures  gi*eedily  doth  prey  ; 

Then,  when  he  hath  both  played  and  fed  his  fill, 
In  the  warm  sun  he  doth  himself  embay. 

And  there  him  rests  in  riotous  suffisance 

Of  all  his  gladfulness  and  kingly  joyance. 

105 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

What  more  felicity  can  fall  a  creature 

Than  to  enjoy  delight  with  liberty? 
And  to  be  lord  of  all  the  works  of  Nature, 

To  reign  in  the  air  from  earth  to  highest  sky? 
To  feed  on  flowers  and  weeds  of  glorious  feature, 

To  take  whatever  thing  doth  please  the  eye "? 
Who  rests  not  pleased  with  such  happiness 
Well  worthy  he  to  taste  of  wretchedness. 

What  poet  has  ever  left  us  such  a  portrait  of 
himself  as  this  ?  lu  that  butterfly  Spenser  has 
symbolized  the  purely  poetical  nature.  It  will  be 
seen  that  there  is  no  recognition  of  the  moral  sense 
whatever.  The  poetic  nature  considered  abstractly 
craves  only  beauty  and  delight  —  without  any 
thought  beyond — 

And  whatsoe'er  of  virtue  good  or  ill, 

To  feed  on  flowers  and  weeds  of  glorious  feature. 

The  poetical  temperament  has  nowhere  been  at 
once  so  exquisitely  defined  and  illustrated.  Among 
poets,  Spenser  stands  for  the  temperament  per- 
sonified. 

But  how  did  it  happen  that  this  lightsome  crea- 
ture, whose  only  business  was 

To  reign  in  the  air  from  earth  to  highest  sky, 

lOG 


SPENSER 

should  have  attempted  in  his  greatest  work  to  mix 
together  two  such  incoherent  things  as  sermon  and 
poem?  In  the  first  place,  the  age  out  of  which  a 
man  is  born  is  the  mother  of  his  mind,  and  imprints 
her  own  likeness  more  or  less  clearly  on  the  fea- 
tures of  her  child.  There  are  two  destinies  from 
which  no  one  can  escape,  his  own  idiosyncrasy, 
and  that  of  the  time  in  which  he  lives.  Or  shall 
we  say  that  where  the  brain  is  in  flower  of  its  con- 
ceptions, the  very  air  is  full  of  thought-pollen,  or 
some  wandering  bee  will  bring  it,  we  know  not  from 
what  far  field,  to  hybridize  the  fruit ! 

In  Spenser's  time  England  was  just  going  through 
the  vinous  stage  of  that  Puritanic  fermentation 
which  became  acetous  in  Milton,  and  putrefactive 
in  the  Fifth  Monarchy  men.  Here  was  one  motive. 
But,  l)esides  this,  it  is  evident  that  Spenser's  fancy 
had  been  colored  by  the  Romances  which  were 
popular  in  his  day ;  and  these  had  all  been  allego- 
rized by  the  monks,  who  turned  them  into  prose. 
The  adventure  of  the  San  Grail  in  the  "Morte 
d'Arthur"  reads  almost  like  an  extract  from  the 
"  Pilgrim's  Progress."  Allegories  were  the  fashion, 
and  Spenser  put  one  on  as  he  did  a  ruff,  not  because 
it  was  the  most  convenient  or  becoming  thing  in 
the  world,  but  because  other  people  did. 

Another  reason  is  probably  to  be  found  in  the 

107 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

nature  of  the  man  himself.  The  poetical  tempera- 
ment, when  it  comes  down  to  earth  and  mingles 
with  men,  is  conscious  of  a  certain  weakness.  On 
the  unsubstantial  skyey  floors  of  its  own  ideal  world 
it  walks  firmly  enough,  and  speaks  the  native  lan- 
guage of  the  shadowy  population  there.  But  there 
is  a  knell  at  which  that  beautiful  land  dissolves  like 
the  baseless  fabric  of  a  vision  —  and  that  is  the 
dinner  bell.  The  poetical  temperament  becomes 
keenly  conscious  that  it  also  has  a  stomach.  It 
must  dine,  and  commonly  it  likes  rather  better  din- 
ners than  other  people.  To  this  end  it  must  carry 
its  wares  to  market  where  the  understanding  is 
master.  Will  the  understanding  pay  hard  money 
for  the  flowers  of  speech?  Only  what  is  practical 
will  do  there.  "Fine  words,"  grumbles  the  Under- 
standing proverbially,  "butter  no  parsnips;  and 
then,  to  make  the  matter  worse,  the  parsnips  are 
ideal.^''  "  But,  my  dear  sii',"  remonstrates  Tempera- 
ment mildly —  "Dear  me  no  dears,"  growls  Under- 
standing. "Everybody  must  earn  his  own  salt  —  I 
do."  "  Let  me  read  you  my  beautiful  poem." 
"  Can't  comprehend  a  word  of  it.  The  only  lan- 
guage I  know  a  word  of  is  my  old  mother  tongue, 
the  useful.  Look  at  the  towns  and  ships  I  've  built. 
Nothing  ideal  there.,  you'll  find.  Ideal,  I  suppose, 
is  a  new-fangled  way  of  spelling  idle.    It  won't  go 

108 


SPENSER 

/iere."  Suddenly  the  useful  seems  a  very  solid  and 
powerful  thing  to  our  poor  friend,  the  Poetic  Tem- 
perament. It  begins  to  feel  a  little  absurd  in  talk- 
ing enthusiasm  to  such  a  matter-of-fact  generation. 
The  problem  is  how  to  translate  the  ideal  into  the 
useful.  How  shall  Master  Edmund  Spenser  make 
himself  comprehensible  to  Master  John  Bull!  He 
will  try  a  picture-book,  and  a  moral  one,  too  —  he 
will  write  an  Allegory. 

Allegory  is  the  Imagination  of  the  Understanding, 
or  what  it  supposes  to  be,  which  is  the  same  thing. 
It  is  the  ideal  in  words  of  one  syllable,  illustrated 
with  cuts,  and  adapted  to  the  meanest  comprehen- 
sion. 

Spenser  was  a  good  and  pure-minded  man,  and 
wished  probably  to  combine  the  sacred  ofhce  of 
Teacher  with  that  of  Poet.  The  preaching  part  of 
him  came  afterwards  in  Jeremy  Taylor,  who  was 
Spenser  with  his  singing-robes  off. 

Spenser's  mind  was  so  thoroughly  imbued  with 
the  beautiful  that  he  makes  even  the  Cave  of  Mam- 
mon a  place  one  would  like  to  live  in. 

I  think  it  is  the  want  of  human  interest  that 
makes  the  "Faery  Queene"  so  little  read.  Hazlitt 
has  said  that  nobody  need  be  afraid  of  the  alle- 
gory ;  it  will  not  bite  them,  nor  meddle  with  them 
unless  they  meddle  with  it.     It  was  the  first  poem 

109 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

I  ever  read,  and  I  had  no  suspicion  of  any  double 
meaning  in  it.  If  we  think  of  the  moral  as  we  read 
it  will  injure  the  effect  of  the  poem,  because  we 
have  an  instinctive  feeling  that  Beauty  includes  its 
own  moral,  and  does  not  need  to  have  it  stuck  on. 

Charles  Lamb  made  the  most  comprehensive 
criticism  upon  Spenser  when  he  called  him  the 
"  poets'  poet."  This  was  a  magic  mirror  which  he 
held  up  to  life,  where  only  shapes  of  loveliness  are 
reflected.  A  joyous  feeling  of  the  beautiful  thrills 
through  the  whole  poem. 

I  think  that  Spenser  has  come  nearer  to  express- 
ing the  unattainable  something  than  any  other  poet. 
He  is  so  purely  a  poet  of  beauty  that  with  him  the 
meaning  does  not  modulate  the  music  of  the  verse, 
but  the  music  is  a  great  part  of  the  meaning. 
No  poet  is  so  splendidly  superfluous  as  he.  He 
knows  too  well  that  in  poetry  enough  is  parsimony. 
The  delight  of  beauty  is  that  it  is  like  a  fountain, 
forever  changing,  forever  the  same,  and  forever 
more  than  full. 

Spenser  has  characterized  his  own  poem  in  the 
song  which  the  Sirens  sing  to  Sir  Gruyon  in  the 
twelfth  canto  of  the  second  book.  The  whole  pas- 
sage also  may  be  called  his  musical  as  distinguished 
from  his  picturesque  style. 

In  reading  Spenser  one  may  see  all  the  great  gal- 

110 


SPENSER 

leries  of  painting  without  stepping  over  his  thres- 
hold. Michael  Angelo  is  the  only  artist  that  he  will 
not  find  there.  It  may  be  said  of  him  that  he  is  not 
a  narrative  poet  at  all,  that  he  tells  no  stories,  but 
paints  them. 

I  have  said  that  among  our  poets  Spenser  stands 
for  the  personification  of  the  poetic  sense  and  tem- 
perament. In  him  the  senses  were  so  sublimed 
and  etherealized,  and  sympathized  so  harmoniously 
with  an  intellect  of  the  subtlest  quality  that,  with 
Dr.  Donne,  we  "  could  almost  say  his  body  thought." 
This  benign  introfusion  of  sense  and  spirit  it  is 
which  gives  his  poetry  the  charm  of  crystalline 
purity  without  loss  of  warmth.  He  is  ideal  without 
being  merely  imaginative;  he  is  sensuous  without 
any  suggestion  of  flesh  and  blood.  He  is  full  of 
feeling,  and  yet  of  such  a  kind  that  we  can  neither 
call  it  mere  intellectual  perception  of  what  is  fair 
and  good  and  touching,  nor  associate  it  with  that 
throbbing  warmth  which  leads  us  to  call  sensibility 
by  its  liuman  name  of  heart.  In  the  world  into 
which  he  carries  us  there  is  neither  space  nor  time, 
and  so  far  it  is  purely  intellectual,  but  then  it  is  full 
of  form  and  color  and  all  earthly  gorgeousness,  and 
so  far  it  is  sensual.  There  are  no  men  and  w^omen 
in  it,  and  yet  it  throngs  with  airy  and  immortal 
shapes  that  have  the  likeness  of  men  and  women. 

Ill 


LECTURES   ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

To  appreciate  fully  the  sensuous  intellectuality 
of  this  divine  poet,  compare  him  for  a  moment 
with  Pope,  who  had  an  equal  subtlety  of  brain 
without  the  joyous  poetic  sense.  Pope's  mind  was 
like  a  perfectly  clear  mirror  hung  in  a  drawing- 
room,  and  reflecting  with  perfect  precision  of  out- 
line and  vividness  of  coloring,  not  man,  but  good 
society,  every  grace  and  every  folly  that  belong  not 
to  human  nature  in  its  broad  meaning,  but  as  it  is 
subordinated  by  fashion.  But  Spenser  is  like  a 
great  calm  pool  that  lies  brooding  in  delicious 
reverie  over  its  golden  sands  in  some  enchanted 
world.  If  we  look  into  it  we  know  not  if  we  see  the 
shadows  of  clouds  and  trees  and  castles,  of  bright- 
armored  knights  and  peerless  dames  that  linger 
and  are  gone ;  or  whether  those  pellucid  depths  are 
only  a  mysterious  reservoir,  where  all  the  fairest 
dreams  of  our  youth,  dreams  that  were  like  hopes, 
and  hopes  that  were  but  dreams,  are  visionarily 
gathered.  Anon  a  ripple,  born  of  no  breeze,  but  of 
the  poet's  own  conscious  joy,  startles  it  into  a  dance 
of  sunshine  that  fades  away  around  its  shores  in  a 
lapsing  murmur  that  seems  the  shadow  of  music 
rather  than  its  substance. 

So  entirely  are  beauty  and  delight  the  element  of 
Spenser,  that  whenever  in  the  "  Faery  Queene  "  you 
come  upon  a  thought  or  moral  reflection  it  gives 

112 


SPENSER 

you  a  shock  of  unpleasant  surprise,  a  kind  of  grit, 
as  when  one's  teeth  close  upon  a  bit  of  gravel  in 
a  dish  of  strawberries  and  cream.  He  is  the 
most  fluent  of  our  poets.  Sensation  passing  over 
through  emotion  into  reverie  is  the  characteristic 
of  his  manner. 

And  to  read  him  puts  one  in  the  condition  of 
reverie  —  a  state  of  mind  in  which  one's  thoughts 
and  feelings  float  motionless  as  you  may  see  fishes 
do  in  a  swift  brook,  only  vibrating  their  fins 
enough  to  keep  themselves  from  being  swept  down 
the  current,  while  their  bodies  yield  to  all  its 
curvings  and  quiver  with  the  thrills  of  its  fluid 
and  sinuous  delight.  It  is  a  luxury  beyond  lux- 
ury itself,  for  it  is  uot  only  dreaming  awake,  but 
dreaming  without  the  trouble  of  doing  it  your- 
self; letting  it  be  done  for  you,  in  truth,  by  the 
finest  dreamer  that  ever  lived,  who  has  the  art  of 
giving  you  all  his  own  visions  through  the  medium 
of  music. 

Of  the  versification  of  Spenser  we  need  attempt 
no  higher  praise  than  that  it  belonged  to  him.  If 
we  would  feel  the  infinite  variety  of  the  Spenserian 
stanza,  as  Spenser  uses  it,  its  musical  intricacies, 
its  long,  sliding  cadences,  smooth  as  the  green  slope 
on  the  edge  of  Niagara,  we  have  only  to  read  verses 
of  the  same  measure  by  other  poets. 
8  iw 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

As  showing  his  pathos,  Mr.  Lowell  read  Una's 
lament  on  her  desertion  by  the  Red  Cross  Knight, 
and  other  pieces,  calling  attention  particularly  to 
the  fact  that  his  females  were  not  women,  like  those 
of  Shakspeare,  but  ideal  beings. 

We  are  accustomed  to  apologize  for  the  grossness 
of  our  favorite  old  authors  by  saying  that  their  age 
was  to  blame,  and  not  they.  Spenser  needs  no  such 
excuses.  He  is  the  most  perfect  gentleman  among 
poets.  Through  that  unrefined  time,  when  ladies 
drank  a  quart  of  ale  for  breakfast,  and  even  Hamlet 
can  say  a  coarse  thing  to  Ophelia,  Spenser  passes 
pure  and  chaste  as  another  Sir  Galahad. 

Whoever  can  endure  unmixed  delight,  whoever 
can  tolerate  music,  and  painting,  and  poetry,  all  in 
one,  whoever  wishes  to  be  rid  of  thought  and  to  let 
the  busy  anvils  of  the  brain  be  silent  for  a  time,  let 
him  read  in  the  "Faery  Queene."  There  is  a  land  of 
pure  Heart's  Ease  where  no  ache  or  sorrow  of  spirit 
can  enter.  If  there  be  any  poet  whom  we  can  love 
and  feel  grateful  toward,  it  is  Edmund  Spenser. 


114 


LECTUKE    VII 

MILTON 

{Tuesday  Evening,  January  SO,  1855) 


VII 


BETWEEN  Spenser  and  Milton  occurred  the 
most  truly  imaginative  period  of  English 
poetry.  It  is  the  time  of  Shakspeare  and  of  the 
other  dramatists  only  less  than  he.  It  seems  to 
have  been  the  moment  in  which  the  English  mind 
culminated. 

Even  if  we  subtract  Shakspeare,  the  age  remains 
without  a  parallel.  The  English  nature  was  just 
then  giving  a  great  heave  and  yearn  toward  free- 
dom in  politics  and  religion,  and  literature  could 
not  fail  to  partake  of  the  movement. 

A  wave  of  enthusiasm  seemed  to  break  over 
England ;  all  that  was  poetical  in  the  people  found 
expression  in  deed  or  word.  Everything  tasted  of 
it  —  sermons  and  speeches  as  well  as  verses.  The 
travelers  could  not  write  a  dry  journal,  but  they 
somehow  blundered  into  a  poetical  phrase  that 
clings  to  the  memory  like  a  perfume.  The  sensa- 
tions of  men  were  as  fresh  as  Adam's,  and  the 
words  they  found  to  speak  them  in  could  be  beau- 

8*  117 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

tiful  or  fragrant  with  as   little  effort   as  it  costs 
violets  to  be  blue. 

It  is  a  remarkable  fact  that  the  poetry  of  Shak- 
speare  is  at  the  same  time  more  English  and  more 
universally  human  than  any  that  was  ever  written. 
The  two  great  poets  who  came  before  Shakspeare 
had  both  of  them  enlarged  the  revenues  of  the 
English  muse.  Chaucer  had  added  character  and 
incident,  and  had  shown  the  capacities  of  the  lan- 
guage and  of  the  metre,  Spenser  left  it  enriched 
with  a  luxury  of  diction,  with  harmony  of  verse, 
and  with  the  lovely  images  of  the  classical  myth- 
ology. But  Shakspeare  came  in  like  an  unthrift 
heir.  He  squandered  everything.  From  king  to 
clown  he  used  up  all  character  ;  there  is  no  passion, 
or  fancy,  or  feeling  that  he  has  not  spent ;  no  ques- 
tion of  philosophy,  morals,  politics,  or  metaphysics 
that  he  has  not  solved;  he  poured  out  all  the 
golden  accumulations  of  diction  like  water.  And 
his  younger  brethren,  the  other  dramatists,  helped 
him.  What  was  there  left?  Certainly,  this  won- 
derful being  has  expressed  every  sentiment,  every 
thought,  that  is  universal  in  its  relations.  All  the 
poetry  of  this  world  he  exhausted.  Accordingly,  in 
the  time  immediately  following  this  splendidly  imag- 
inative period,  we  find  only  a  development  of  fancy 
under  one  or  other  of  its  disguises.     Fancy  deals 

118 


MILTON 

with  limited  and  personal  experiences,  and  interests 
us  by  the  grace  or  perfectness  of  its  expression  of 
these.  The  Dramatists  were  tremendously  in  ear- 
nest, as  they  had  need  to  be,  to  please  a  people 
who  were  getting  in  earnest  themselves.  But  now 
the  time  itself  was  preparing  a  drama,  and  on  no 
mimic  scene,  but  with  England  for  a  stage  and  with 
all  Europe  for  spectators.  A  real  historical  play 
was  in  rehearsal,  no  petty  war  of  York  and  Lan- 
caster, but  the  death-grapple  of  two  eras.  The 
time  was  in  travail  with  the  Ishmael  of  Puritanism  v^ 
who,  exiled  from  his  father's  house,  was  to  found 
here  in  this  Western  wilderness  an  empire  for  him- 
self and  his  wandering  descendants.  England  her- 
self was  turning  f)oet,  and  would  add  her  rhapsody 
to  the  great  epic  of  the  nations. 

That  was  a  day  of  earnest  and  painful  thinking, 
and  poetical  temperaments  naturally  found  relief  in 
turning  away  from  actual  life  to  the  play  of  the 
fancy.  We  find  no  trace  of  high  imagination  here. 
Certainly,  Herbert  and  Vaughan  and  even  Quarles 
are  sometimes  snatched  into  something  above  com- 
mon fancy  by  religious  fervor,  but  how  cold  and 
experimental  is  the  greater  part  of  their  poetry  — 
not  poetry,  indeed,  but  devotional  exercises  in 
verse.  Cowley  wrote  imaginary  love-songs  to  an 
imaginary  mistress,  and  Waller  the  same  sort  of 

119 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

stuff  to  a  real  one.  Catullus  revived  in  Herrick,  a 
country  parson.  Wither,  a  Puritan,  wrote  some 
poems  full  of  nature  and  feeling,  and  remarka- 
ble for  purity  of  sentiment.  Donne,  a  deep  thinker, 
carried  on  his  anatomical  studies  into  his  verse, 
and  dissected  his  thoughts  and  feelings  to  the  small- 
est nerve.  A  great  many  nice  things  got  said,  no 
doubt,  and  many  charming  little  poems  were  writ- 
ten —  but  the  great  style  appears  no  longer. 

It  was  during  this  lull,  as  we  may  call  it,  that  fol- 
lowed the  mighty  day  of  the  Dramatists,  that  Milton 
was  growing  up.  He  was  born  in  London  on  the 
ninth  of  December,  1608,  and  was  therefore  in  his 
eighth  year  when  Shakspeare  died.  His  father  was 
of  a  good  family,  which  still  adhered  to  the  Roman 
Catholic  faith.  What  is  of  more  importance,  he  was 
disinherited  by  Ms  father  for  having  adopted  Puritan 
principles ;  and  he  was  a  excellent  musician.  Mil- 
ton was  very  early  an  indefatigable  student,  even  in 
his  twelfth  year  seldom  leaving  his  books  before 
midnight.  At  the  university  he  was  distinguished 
as  a  Latin  scholar  and  writer  of  Latin  verses.  He 
was  intended  for  the  Church,  but  had  already 
formed  opinions  of  his  own  which  put  conformity 
out  of  the  question.  He  was  by  nature  an  Inde- 
pendent, and  could  not,  as  he  says,  "  subscribe 
slaveP 

120 


MILTON 

Leaving  the  university  in  1632,  he  passed  the 
five  following  years  in  a  studious  seclusion  at  his 
father's  house  at  Horton,  in  Buckinghamshire.  Du- 
ring these  five  years  he  wrote  most  of  his  smaller 
poems.  In  1638  he  set  out  for  Italy.  The  most  im- 
portant events  of  his  stay  in  that  country  w^ere  his 
meetings  with  Galileo,  and  the  Marquis  Man  so,  who 
had  been  Tasso's  friend.  After  refreshing  his  Pro- 
testantism at  Geneva,  he  passed  through  France 
and  came  back  to  England  to  find  the  Civil  War 
already  begun. 

Dr.  Johnson  sneers  at  Milton  for  having  come 
home  from  Italy  because  he  could  not  stay  abroad 
while  his  countrymen  were  struggling  for  their 
freedom,  and  then  quietly  settling  down  as  a 
teacher  of  a  few  boys  for  bread.  It  might,  with 
equal  reason,  have  been  asked  of  the  Doctor  why, 
instead  of  writing  "  Taxation  no  Tyranu}^,"  he  did 
not  volunteer  in  the  w^ar  against  the  rebel  Ameri- 
can provinces  ?  Milton  sacrificed  to  the  cause  he 
thought  holy  something  dearer  to  him  than  life — 
the  hope  of  an  earthly  immortality  in  a  great  poem. 
He  suffered  his  eyes  to  be  put  out  for  the  sake  of 
his  country  as  deliberately  as  Scsevola  thrust  his 
hand  into  the  flame.  He  gave  to  freedom  some- 
thing better  than  a  sword  —  words  that  were  vic- 
tories.     Around   the   memories   of  Bradshaw  and 

121 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

his  illustrious  brethren  his  deathless  soldiery  still 
pitch  their  iiiviiicil)le  tents,  still  keep  their  long- 
resounding  march,  sure  Wcxrders  against  obloquy 
and  oblivion. 

After  the  death  of  Cromwell,  Milton  continued 
faithful  to  republicanism,  and  on  the  very  eve  of  the 
Restoration  published  his  last  political  tract,  show- 
ing a  short  and  easy  way  to  establish  a  Christian 
commonwealth.  He  had  long  ago  quarreled  with 
the  Presbyterians  in  discij)line,  and  separated  from 
the  Independents  in  doctrine.  For  many  years  he 
did  not  go  within  any  church  and  had  become 
a  Unitarian.  He  had  begun  "Paradise  Lost"  in 
1658,  and  after  the  Restoration,  with  a  broken  for- 
tune, but  with  a  constancy  which  nothing  could 
break,  shattered  in  health,  blind,  and  for  a  time  in 
danger,  he  continued  the  composition  of  it.  It  was 
complete  in  1665,  when  El  wood,  the  Quaker,  had 
the  reading  of  it,  and  it  was  published  in  1667. 

The  translation  of  the  Bible  had  to  a  very  great 
extent  Judaized  the  Puritan  mind.  England  was 
no  longer  England,  but  Israel.  Those  fierce  en- 
thusiasts could  always  find  Amalek  and  Philistia 
in  the  men  who  met  them  in  the  field,  and  one 
horn  or  the  other  of  the  beast  in  every  doctrine 
of  their  theological  adversaries.  The  spiritual  pro- 
vincialism of  the  Jewish  race  found  something  con- 

122 


MILTON 

genial  in  the  Anglo-Saxon  intellect.  This  element 
of  the  Puritan  character  appears  in  Milton  also,  as 
in  that  stern  sonnet : 

Avenge,  O  Lord,  tliy  slaughtered  saints,  whose  bones 
Lie  scattered  on  the  Alpine  mountains  cold. 
Even  them  who  kept  thy  truth  so  pure  of  old 

When  all  our  fathers  worshipped  stocks  and  stones. 

In  Milton's  prose  there  is  a  constant  assertion  of 
himself  as  a  man  set  apart  to  a  divine  ministry. 
He  seems  to  translate  himself  out  of  Hebrew  into 
English.  And  yet  so  steeped  was  he  in  Grreek  cul- 
ture that  it  is  sometimes  hard  to  say  whether  he 
would  rather  call  himself  the  messenger  of  Jehovah 
or  the  son  of  Phoebus.  Continually  the  fugitive 
mists  of  dialectics  are  rent,  and  through  them  shine 
down  serene  and  solemn  peaks  that  make  us  feel 
that  we  are  encamped  about  hj  the  sacred  mounts 
of  song,  but  whether  of  Palestine  or  of  Grreece  is 
doubtful.  We  may  apply  to  Milton  what  Schiller 
says  of  the  poet,  "  Let  the  kind  divinity  snatch  the 
suckling  from  his  mother's  breast,  nourish  him  with 
the  milk  of  a  better  age,  and  let  him  come  to  maturity 
beneath  a  distant  Grecian  sky.  Then  when  he  has 
become  a  man  let  him  return,  a  foreign  shape,  into 
his  century,  not  to  delight  it  with  his  apparition, 
but  terrible,  like  Agamemnon's  son,  to  purify  it." 

123 


^ 
•^ 


LECTURES   ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

I  said  that  Milton  had  a  sublime  egotism.  The 
egotism  of  a  great  character  is  inspiration  because 
it  generalizes  self  into  universal  law.  It  is  a  very 
different  thing  from  the  vulgar  egotism  of  a  little 
nature  which  contracts  universal  Law  into  self.  The 
one  expands  with  a  feeling  that  it  is  a  part  of  the 
law-making  power,  the  other  offers  an  amendment  in 
town-meeting  as  if  it  came  from  Sinai.  Milton's  su- 
perb conception  of  himself  enters  into  all  he  does ; 
if  }ie  is  blind,  it  is  with  excess  of  light — it  is  a  di- 
vine favor,  an  overshadowing  with  angel's  wings. 
Phineus  and  Tiresias  are  admitted  among  the  pro- 
phets because  they,  too,  had  lost  their  sight.  There 
is  more  merit  in  the  blindness  of  M^onides  than 
in  his  "  Iliad  "  or  "  Odyssey."  If  the  structure  of  ¥is 
mind  is  undramatic,  why,  then  the  English  drama 
is  barbarous,  and  he  will  write  a  tragedy  on  a 
Greek  model  with  blind  Samson  for  a  hero. 

It  results  from  this  that  no  great  poet  is  so  uni- 
formly self-conscious  as  he.  Dante  is  individual 
rather  than  self-conscious,  and  the  cast-iron  Dante 
becomes  pliable  as  a  field  of  grain  at  the  breath  of 
Beatrice,  and  his  whole  nature,  rooted  as  it  is,  seems 
to  flow  away  in  waves  of  sunshine.  But  Milton 
never  lets  himself  go  for  a  moment.  As  other  poets 
are  possessed  by  their  theme,  so  is  he  always  self- 
possessed,  his  great  theme  being  Milton,  and  his  duty 

124 


MILTON 

being  that  of  interpreter  between  John  Milton  and 
the  world.  I  speak  it  reverently — he  was  worth 
translating. 

We  should  say  of  Shakspeare  that  he  had  the 
power  of  transforming  himself  into  everything,  and 
of  Milton  that  he  had  that  of  transforming  every- 
thing into  himself.  He  is  the  most  learned  of  poets. 
Dante,  it  is  true,  represents  all  the  scholarship  of 
his  age,  but  Milton  belonged  to  a  more  learned  age, 
was  himself  one  of  the  most  learned  men  in  it,  and 
included  Dante  himself  among  his  learning.  No 
poet  is  so  indebted  to  books  and  so  little  to  personal 
observation  as  he.  I  thought  once  that  he  had 
created  out  of  his  own  consciousness  those  ex- 
quisite lines  in  "  Comus  "  : 

A  thousand  fantasies 
Begin  to  throng  into  my  memory 
Of  calling  shapes,  and  beckoning  shadows  dire, 
And  airy  tongues  that  syllable  men's  names 
On  sands  and  shores  and  desert  wildernesses. 

But  I  afterwards  found  that  he  had  built  them 
up  out  of  a  dry  sentence  in  Marco  Polo's  "  Travels." 
The  wealth  of  Milton  in  this  respect  is  wonderful. 
He  subsidizes  whole  provinces  of  learning  to  spend 
their  revenues  upon  one  lavish  sentence,  and  melts 

125 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

history,  poetry,  mytliology,  and  philosophy  together 
to  make  the  rich  Miltonic  metal  of  a  single  verse. 

The  first  noticeable  poem  of  Milton  is  his  "  Hymn 
of  the  Nativity,"  and  the  long-enwoven  harmony  of 
the  versification  is  what  chiefly  deserves  attention 
in  it.  It  is  this  which  marks  the  advent  of  a  new 
power  into  English  poetry. 

In  Spenser  meaning  and  music  are  fused  to- 
gether; in  Shakspeare  the  meaning  dominates 
always  (and  I  intend  the  sentiment  as  included  in 
the  word  meaning) ;  but  in  Milton  the  music  is 
always  a  primary  consideration.  He  is  always  as 
much  musician  as  poet.  And  he  is  a  harmonist, 
not  a  melodist.  He  loves  great  pomps  and  se- 
quences of  verse,  and  his  first  passages  move  like 
long  processions,  winding  with  sacred  chant,  and 
priestly  robes  rich  with  emblematic  gold,  and  waving 
of  holy  banners,  along  the  echoing  aisles  of  some 
cathedral.  Accordingly,  no  reader  of  Milton  can 
fail  to  notice  that  he  is  fond  of  lists  of  proper 
names  which  can  have  only  an  acquired  imaginative 
value,  and  in  that  way  serve  to  excite  our  poetic 
sensibility,  but  which  also  are  of  deep  musical  sig- 
nificance. 

This  was  illustrated  by  reading  various  passages 
from  "  Paradise  Lost." 

Another  striking  peculiarity  of  Milton  is  the  feel- 

126 


MILTON 

ing  of  spaciousness  which  his  poetry  gives  us,  and 
that  not  only  in  whole  paragraphs,  but  even  in  sin- 
gle words.  His  mind  was  one  which  demanded  il- 
limitable room  to  turn  in.  His  finest  passages  are 
those  in  which  the  imagination  diffuses  itself  over  a 
whole  scene  or  landscape,  or  where  it  seems  to  cir- 
cle like  an  eagle  controlling  with  its  eye  broad 
sweeps  of  champaign  and  of  sea,  bathing  itself  in 
the  blue  streams  of  air,  and  seldom  drawn  earth- 
ward in  the  concentrated  energy  of  its  swoop. 

This  shows  itself  unmistakably  in  the  epithets 
of  his  earlier  poems.  In  "  II  Penseroso,"  for  ex- 
ample, where  he  hears 

The  far-off  curfew  sound 
Over  some  unde-umtered  shore 
Swinging  slow  with  sullen  roar  ; 

where  he  sees 

Gorgeous  Tragedy 
In  sceptered  pall  come  sweeping  by, 

or  calls  up  the  great  bards  who  have  sung 

Of  forests  and  enchantments  drear 
Where  more  is  meant  than  meets  the  ear. 

Milton  seems  to  produce  his  effects  by  exciting  or 
dilating  our  own  imaginations ;  and  this  excitement 

127 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

accomplished,  he  is  satisfied.  Shakspeare,  on  the 
other  hand,  seldom  leaves  any  work  to  be  done  by 
the  imagination  of  his  readers ;  and  after  we  have 
enjoyed  the  total  effect  of  a  passage,  we  may  al- 
ways study  the  particulars  with  advantage.  Shak- 
speare never  attaches  any  particular  value  to  his 
thoughts,  or  images,  or  phrases,  but  scatters  them 
with  a  royal  carelessness.  Milton  seems  always  to 
respect  his ;  he  lays  out  broad  avenues  for  the  tri- 
umphal processions  of  his  verse ;  covers  the  ground 
with  tapestry  inwoven  with  figures  of  mythology 
and  romance;  builds  up  arches  rich  with  historic 
carvings  for  them  to  march  under,  and  accompanies 
them  with  swells  and  cadences  of  inspiring  music. 
^^  (.1^'^^^     "Paradise  Lost''  is  full  of  what  may  be  called  vistas 

Of 

of  verse.  Notice,  for  example,  how  far  off  he  begins 
when  he  is  about  to  speak  of  himself — as  at  the  be- 
ginning of  the  third  book  and  of  the  seventh.  When 
you  read  "  Paradise  Lost "  the  feeling  you  have  is 
one  of  vastness.  You  float  under  a  great  sky  brim- 
med with  sunshine,  or  hung  with  constellations ;  the 
abyss  of  space  is  around  you ;  thunders  mutter  on 
the  horizon ;  you  hear  the  mysterious  sigh  of  an 
unseen  ocean ;  and  if  the  scene  changes,  it  is  with 
an  elemental  movement  like  the  shifting  of  mighty 
winds.  Of  all  books  it  seems  most  purely  the  work 
of  a  disembodied  mind.     Of  all  poets  he  could  most 

128 


MILTON 

easily  afford  to  be  blind;  of  all,  his  poetry  owes 
least  to  the  senses,  except  that  of  hearing;  every- 
thing, except  his  music,  came  to  him  through  a 
mental  medium,  and  perhaps  even  that  may  have 
been  intellectual — as  in  Beethoven,  who  composed 
behind  the  veil  of  deafness. 

Milton  is  a  remarkable  instance  of  a  great  imag- 
inative faculty  fed  by  books  instead  of  Nature. 
One  has  only  to  read  the  notes  of  the  commentators 
upon  his  poems  to  see  how  perfectly  he  made  what- 
ever he  took  his  own.  Everything  that  he  touches 
swells  and  towers  into  vastness.  It  is  wonderful  to 
see  how,  from  the  most  withered  and  juiceless  hint 
that  he  met  in  his  reading,  his  grand  images  "rise 
like  an  exhalation";  how  from  the  most  hopeless- 
looking  leaden  box  that  he  found  in  that  huge  drag- 
net with  which  he  gathered  everything  from  the 
waters  of  learning,  he  could  conjure  a  tall  genius 
to  do  his  bidding. 

That  proud  consciousness  of  his  own  strength, 
and  confidence  at  the  same  time  that  he  is  the  mes- 
senger of  the  Most  High,  never  forsake  him.  It  is 
they  which  give  him  his  grand  manner,  and  make 
him  speak  as  if  with  the  voice  of  a  continent.  He 
reverenced  always  the  sacredness  of  his  own  call- 
ing and  character.  As  poet,  full  of  the  lore  of  an- 
tiquity, and,  as  prophet,  charged  to  vindicate  the 

9  129 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

ways  of  God,  it  seems  to  me  that  I  see  the  majestic 
old  man  laying  one  hand  npon  the  shoulder  of  the 
Past,  and  the  other  npon  that  of  the  Future,  and  so 
standing  sublimely  erect  above  that  abject  age  to 
pour  his  voice  along  the  centuries.  We  are  re- 
minded of  what  is  told  of  Firdusi,  whose  father  on 
the  night  he  was  born  dreamed  he  saw  him  stand- 
ing in  the  middle  of  the  earth  and  singing  so  loud 
and  clear  that  he  was  heard  in  all  four  quarters  of 
the  heavens  at  once. 

I  feel  how  utterly  inadequate  any  single  lecture 
must  be  on  such  a  theme,  and  how  impossible  it  is 
to  say  anything  about  Milton  in  an  hour.     I  have 
merely   touched   upon   three   or   four   points   that 
seemed  to  me  most  characteristic  of  his  style,  for 
our  concern  with  him  is  solely  as  a  poet.    Yet  it 
would  be  an  unpardonable  reticence  if  I  did  not  say, 
before  I  close,  how  profoundly  we  ought  to  rever- 
ence the  grandeur  of  the  man,  his  incorruptible  love 
of  freedom,  his  scholarly  and  uuvulgar  republican- 
ism, his  scorn  of  contemporary  success,  his  faith  in 
the  future  and  in  God,  his  noble  frugality  of  life. 
-<         The  noise  of  those  old  warfares  is  hushed;  the 
song  of  Cavalier  and  the  fierce  psalm  of  the  Puritan 
A         are  silent  now;  the  hands  of  his  episcopal  adver- 
jii        saries  no  longer  hold  pen  or  crozier — they  and  their 
\jj  works  are  dust ;  but  he  who  loved  truth  more  than 

130 


I 


MILTON 

life,  who  was  faithful  to  the  other  world  while  he 
did  his  work  in  this;  his  seat  is  in  that  great  ca- 
thedral whose  far-echoing  aisles  are  the  ages  whis- 
pering with  blessed  feet  of  the  Saints,  Martyrs, 
and  Confessors  of  every  clime  and  creed;  whose 
bells  sound  only  centurial  hours;  about  whose 
spire  crowned  with  the  constellation  of  the  cross  no 
meaner  birds  than  missioned  angels  hover;  whose 
organ  music  is  the  various  stops  of  endless  changes 
breathed  through  by  endless  good;  whose  choris- 
ters are  the  elect  spirits  of  all  time,  that  sing, 
serene  and  shining  as  morning  stars,  the  ever-re- 
newed mystery  of  Creative  Power. 


131 


LECTUEE   VIII 

BUTLER 

[Friday  Emiing,  February  2,  1855) 


N 


VIII 


TEITHER  the  Understanding  nor  the  Imagina- 


tion is  sane  by  itself ;  the  one  becomes  blank 
worldliness,  the  other  hypochondria.  A  very  little 
imagination  is  able  to  intoxicate  a  weak  under- 
standing, and  this  appears  to  be  the  condition  of 
religious  enthusiasm  in  vulgar  minds.  Puritanism, 
as  long  as  it  had  a  material  object  to  look  forward 
to,  was  strong  and  healthy.  But  Fanaticism  is  al- 
ways defeated  by  success ;  the  moment  it  is  estab- 
lished in  the  repose  of  power,  it  necessarily  crystal- 
lizes into  cant  and  formalism  around  any  slenderest 
threads  of  dogma;  and  if  the  intellectual  fermen- 
tation continue  after  the  spiritual  has  ceased,  as 
it  constantly  does,  it  is  the  fermentation  of  putre- 
faction, breeding  nothing  but  the  vermin  of  inco- 
herent and  destructively-active  metaphysic  subtle- 
ties —  the  maggots,  as  Butler,  condensing  Lord 
Bacon,  calls  them,  of  corrupted  texts.  That  wise 
man  Oliver  Cromwell  has  been  reproached  for 
desertion  of  principles  because  he  recognized  the 
truth  that  though  enthusiasm  may  overturn  a  gov- 

135 


-^ 


LECTUEES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

eminent,  it  can  never  carry  on  one.  Onr  Pnritan 
ancestors  came  to  the  same  conclusion,  and  have 
been  as  unwisely  blamed  for  it.  While  we  wonder 
at  the  prophetic  imagination  of  those  heroic  souls 
who  could  see  in  the  little  Mauflower  the  seeds  of 
an  empire,  while  we  honor  (as  it  can  only  truly 
be  honored  —  by  imitating)  that  fervor  of  purpose 
which  could  give  up  everything  for  principle,  let 
us  be  thankful  that  they  had  also  that  manly  Eug- 
lish  sense  which  refused  to  sacrifice  tlieir  principles 
to  the  fantasy  of  every  wandering  Adoniram  or 
Shear-Jashub  who  mistook  himself  for  Providence 
as  naturally  and  as  obstinately  as  some  lunatics 
suppose  themselves  to  be  tea-pots. 
I  The  imaginative  side  of  Puritanism  found  its  po- 
etical  expression  in  Milton  and  its  prose  in  Bunyan. 
The  intellectual  vagaries  of  its  decline  were  to  have 
their  satirist  in  Butler.  He  was  born  at  Strensham 
in  Worcestershire  in  1612,  the  son  of  a  small  farmer 
who  was  obliged  to  pinch  himself  to  afford  his 
son  a  grammar-school  education.  It  is  more  than 
doubtful  whether  he  were  ever  at  any  university  at 
all.  His  first  employment  was  as  clerk  to  Mr.  Jef- 
fereys,  a  Worcestershire  justice  of  the  peace,  called 
by  the  poet's  biographers  an  eminent  one.  While 
in  this  situation  he  employed  his  leisure  in  study, 
and  in  cultivating  music  and  painting,  for  both  of 

136 


BUTLER 

which  arts  he  had  a  predilection.  He  next  went 
into  the  family  of  the  Countess  of  Kent,  where  he 
had  the  use  of  a  fine  library,  and  where  he  acted  as 
amanuensis  to  John  Selden— the  mere  drippings  of 
whose  learning  were  enough  to  make  a  great  scholar 
of  him.  After  this  he  was  employed  (in  what  capa- 
city is  unknown)  in  the  house  of  Sir  Samuel  Luke, 
an  officer  of  Cromwell,  and  a  rigid  Presbyterian. 
It  was  here  that  he  made  his  studies  for  the  char- 
acters of  Sir  Hudihras  and  his  squire,  BaJplio^  and 
is  supposed  to  have  begun  the  composition  of 
his  great  work.  There  is  hardly  anything  more 
comic  in  "  Hudibras "  itself  than  the  solemn  Coun- 
try Knight  unconsciously  furnishing  clothes  from 
his  wardrobe,  and  a  rope  of  his  own  twisting,  to 
hang  himself  in  eternal  effigy  with.  Butler  has  been 
charged  with  ingratitude  for  having  caricatured  his 
employer ;  but  there  is  no  hint  of  any  obligation  he 
was  under,  and  the  service  of  a  man  like  him  must 
have  been  a  fair  equivalent  for  any  wages. 

On  the  other  hand,  it  has  been  asserted  that  But- 
ler did  not  mean  Sir  Samuel  Luke  at  all,  l)ut  a  cer- 
tain Sir  Henry  Rosewell,  or  a  certain  Colonel  Rolle, 
both  Devonshire  men.  And  in  confirmation  of  it  we 
are  told  that  Sir  Hugh  de  Bras  was  the  tutelary  saint 
of  Devonshire.  Butler,  however,  did  not  have  so 
far  to  go  for  a  name,  but  borrowed  it  from  Spenser. 

137 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

He  himself  is  the  authority  for  the  "  conjecture,"  as 
it  is  called,  that  his  hero  and  Sir  Samuel  Luke  were 
identical.  At  the  end  of  the  first  canto  of  part  first 
of  "  Hudibras  "  occurs  a  couplet  of  which  the  last 
part  of  the  second  verse  is  left  blank.  This  coup- 
let, for  want  of  attention  to  the  accent,  has  been 
taken  to  be  in  ten-syllable  measure,  and  therefore 
an  exception  to  the  rest  of  the  poem.  But  it  is  only 
where  we  read  it  as  a  verse  of  four  feet  that  the  in- 
evitable rhyme  becomes  perfectly  Hudibrastic.  The 
knight  himself  is  the  speaker : 

'Tis  Sling  there  is  a  valiant  Mameluke 
In  foreign  lands  yclept  (Sir  Sam  Luke) 
To  whom  we  have  been  oft  compared 
For  person,  parts,  address  and  beard. 

Butler  died  poor,  but  not  in  want,  on  the  25th  of 
September,  1680,  in  his  sixty-eighth  year. 

Butler's  poem  is  commonly  considered  the  type 
of  the  burlesque  —  that  is,  as  the  representative  of 
the  gravely  ludicrous,  which  seems  to  occupy  a 
kind  of  neutral  ground  between  the  witty  and  the 
humorous.  But  this  is  true  of  the  form  rather  than 
the  matter  of  the  poem.  Burlesque  appears  to  be 
wit  infused  with  animal  spirits  —  satire  for  the 
mere  fun  of  the  thing,  without  any  suggestion  of 
intellectual  disapproval,  or  moral  indignation.  True 

138 


BUTLER 

wit  is  a  kind  of  instantaneous  logic  which  gives  us 
the  quod  erat  demonstrandum  without  the  interme- 
diate steps  of  the  syllogism.  Coleridge,  with  ad- 
mirable acuteness,  has  said  that  "there  is  such  a 
thing  as  scientific  wit."  Therefore  pure  wit  some- 
times gives  an  intellectual  pleasure  without  making 
us  laugh.  The  wit  that  makes  us  laugh  most  freely 
is  that  which  instantly  accepts  another  man's  prem- 
ises, and  draws  a  conclusion  from  them  in  its  own 
favor.  A  country  gentleman  was  once  showing  his 
improvements  to  the  Prince  de  Ligne,  and,  among 
other  things,  pointed  out  to  him  a  muddy  spot 
which  he  called  his  lake.  "  It  is  rather  shallow,  is 
it  not!"  said  the  Prince.  "I  assure  you.  Prince,  a 
man  drowned  himself  in  it."  "  Ah,  he  must  have 
been  a  flatterer,  then,"  answered  De  Ligne.  Of  the 
same  kind  is  the  story  told  of  one  of  our  old  Massa- 
chusetts clergymen,  Dr.  Morse.  At  an  association 
dinner  a  debate  arose  as  to  the  benefit  of  whipping 
in  bringing  up  children.  The  doctor  took  the  af- 
firmative, and  his  chief  opponent  was  a  young  min- 
ister whose  reputation  for  veracity  was  not  very 
high.  He  affirmed  that  parents  often  did  harm 
to  their  children  by  unjust  punishment  from  not 
knowing  the  facts  in  the  case.  "  Why,"  said  he, 
"the  only  time  my  father  ever  whipped  me  was 
for  telling  the  truth."     "  Well,"  retorted  the  doctor, 

139 


c: 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

"  it  cured  you  of  it,  did  u't  it  ? "  In  wit  of  this  sort, 
there  is  always  a  latent  syllogism. 

Then  there  is  the  wit  which  detects  an  uninten- 
tional bit  of  satire  in  a  word  of  double  meaning; 
as  where  Sir  Henry  Wotton  takes  advantage  of  the 
phrase  commonly  used  in  his  day  to  imply  merely 
residence,  and  finds  an  under  meaning  in  it,  saying 
that  "  ambassadors  were  persons  sent  to  lie  abroad 
for  the  service  of  their  prince." 

On  the  other  hand  I  think  unconsciousness  and 
want  of  intention,  or  at  least  the  pretense  of  it,  is 
more  or  less  essential  to  the  ludicrous.  For  this 
reason  what  may  be  called  the  wit  of  events  is  al- 
ways ludicrous.  Nothing  can  be  more  so,  for  ex- 
ample, than  the  Pope's  sending  a  Cardinal's  hat  to 
John  Fisher,  Bishop  of  Rochester,  which  arrived  in 
England  after  Henry  VIII  had  taken  off  that  pre- 
late's head.  So,  when  Dr.  Johnson  said  very  gravely 
oue  day,  that  he  had  often  thought  that  if  he  had  a 
harem  he  would  dress  all  the  ladies  in  white  linen, 
the  unintentional  incongruity  of  the  speech  with 
the  character  of  the  great  moralist  threw  Boswell 
into  an  ecstasy  of  laughter.  Like  this  is  the  ludi- 
crousness  of  Pope  Paul  III  writing  to  the  Council 
of  Trent  "  that  they  should  begin  with  original  sin, 
observing  yet  a  due  respect  unto  the  Emperor." 

Captain  Basil  Hall,  when  he  traveled  in  this  coun- 

140 


BUTLER 

try,  found  the  Yankees  a  people  entirely  destitute 
of  wit  and  humor.  Perhaps  our  gravity,  which 
ought  to  have  put  him  on  the  right  scent,  deceived 
him.  I  do  not  know  a  more  perfect  example  of  wit 
than  something  which,  as  I  have  heard,  was  said  to 
the  captain  himself.  Stopping  at  a  village  inn  there 
came  up  a  thunderstorm,  and  Captain  Hall,  sur- 
prised that  a  new  country  should  have  reached 
such  perfection  in  these  meteorological  manufac- 
tures, said  to  a  bystander,  "  Why,  you  have  very 
heavy  thunder  here."  "Well,  yes,"  replied  the 
man,  "we  du^  considerin'  the  number  of  inhabi- 
tants." Here  is  another  story  which  a  stage-driver 
told  me  once.  A  wag  on  the  outside  of  the  coach 
called  to  a  man  by  the  roadside  who  was  fencing- 
some  very  poor  land  :  "  I  say,  mister,  what  are  you 
fencing  that  pasture  for  ?  It  would  take  forty  acres 
on  't  to  starve  a  middle-sized  cow."  "Jesso;  and 
I  'm  a-fencing  of  it  to  keep  eour  kettle  eout." 

Now  in  the  "forty  acre"  part  of  this  story  we 
have  an  instance  of  what  is  called  American  ex- 
aggeration, and  which  I  take  to  be  the  symptom  of 
most  promise  in  Yankee  fun.  For  it  marks  that 
desire  for  intensity  of  expression  which  is  one 
phase  of  imagination.  Indeed  many  of  these  say- 
ings are  purely  imaginative ;  as  where  a  man  said 
of  a  painter  he  knew,  that  "  he  painted  a  shingle  so 

141 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

exactly  like  marble  that  when  it  fell  into  the  river 
it  sunk."  A  man  told  me  once  that  the  people  of 
a  certain  town  were  so  universally  dishonest  that 
"they  had  to  take  in  their  stone  walls  at  night." 
In  some  of  these  stories  imagination  appears  yet 
more  strongly,  and  in  that  contradictory  union  with 
the  understanding  lies  at  the  root  of  highest  humor. 
For  example,  a  coachman  driving  up  some  steep 
mountains  in  Vermont  was  asked  if  they  were  as 
steep  on  the  other  side  also.  "  Steep!  chain-lightnin' 
could  n't  go  down  'em  without  the  breechin'  on."  I 
believe  that  there  is  more  latent  humor  among  the 
American  people  than  in  any  other,  and  that  it  will 
one  day  develop  itself  and  find  expression  through 
Art. 

If  we  apply  the  definitions  we  have  made  to 
Butler's  poem,  we  shall  find  that  it  is  not  properly 
humorous  at  all ;  that  the  nearest  approach  to  the 
humorous  is  burlesque.  Irony  is  Butler's  favorite 
weapon.  But  he  always  has  an  ulterior  object. 
His  charactei's  do  not  live  at  all,  but  are  only  cari- 
catured effigies  of  political  enemies  stuffed  with 
bi'an  and  set  up  as  targets  for  his  wit.  He  never 
lets  us  forget  for  a  moment  that  Presbyterian  and 
Independent  are  primarily  knaves  and  secondarily 
men.  The  personality  never  by  accident  expands 
into  humanity.    There  is  not  a  trace  of  imagination 

142 


BUTLER 

or  of  sympathy  in  his  poem.  It  is  pm-e  satire,  and 
intellectual  satire  only.  There  is  as  much  creative- 
ness  in  Trumbull's  "McFingal,"  or  Fessenden's 
"  Terrible  Tractoration  "  as  in  "  Hudibras."  Butler 
never  works  from  within,  but  stands  as  a  spectator 
covering  his  victims  with  merciless  ridicule;  and 
we  enjoy  the  fun  because  his  figures  are  as  mere 
nobodies  as  Punch  and  Judy,  whose  misfortunes 
are  meant  to  amuse  us,  and  whose  unreality  is  part 
of  the  sport.  The  characters  of  truly  humorous 
writers  are  as  real  to  us  as  any  of  our  acquain- 
tances. We  no  more  doubt  the  existence  of  the 
Wife  of  Bath,  of  Don  Quixote  and  Sancho,  of  Fal- 
staff,  Sir  Eoger  de  Coverley,  Parson  Adams,  the 
Vicar,  Uncle  Toby,  Pickwick  or  Major  Pendennis, 
than  we  do  our  own.  They  are  the  contemporaries 
of  every  generation  forever.  They  are  our  immor- 
tal friends  whose  epitaph  no  man  shall  ever  write. 
The  only  incantation  needed  to  summon  them  is  the 
taking  of  a  book  from  our  shelf,  and  they  are  with 
us  with  their  wisdom,  their  wit,  their  courtesy,  their 
humanity,  and  (dearer  than  all)  their  weaknesses. 
But  the  figures  of  Butler  are  wholly  contem- 
poraneous with  himself.  They  are  dead  things 
nailed  to  his  age,  like  crows  to  a  barn-door,  for  an 
immediate  in  terrorem  purpose,  to  waste  and  blow 
away  with  time  and  weather.      The  Guy  Fawkes 

143 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

of  a  Fifth  of  November  procession  has  as  much 
manhood  in  it. 

Butler,  then,  is  a  wit  —  in  the  strictest  sense  of 
the  word  —  with  only  such  far-off  hints  at  humor 
as  lie  in  a  sense  of  the  odd,  the  droll,  or  the  ludi- 
crous. But  iu  wit  he  is  supreme.  "  Hudibras  "  is 
as  full  of  point  as  a  paper  of  pins ;  it  sparkles  like 
a  phosphorescent  sea,  every  separate  drop  of  which 
contains  half  a  dozen  little  fiery  lives.  Indeed,  the 
fault  of  the  poem  (if  it  can  be  called  a  fault)  is  that 
it  has  too  much  wit  to  be  easy  reading. 

Butler  had  been  a  great  reader,  and  out  of  the 
dryest  books  of  school  divinity,  Puritan  theology, 
metaphysics,  medicine,  astrology,  mathematics,  no 
matter  what,  his  brain  secreted  wit  as  naturally  as 
a  field  of  corn  will  get  so  much  silex  out  of  a  soil 
as  would  make  flints  for  a  whole  arsenal  of  old- 
fashioned  muskets,  and  where  even  Prometheus 
himself  could  not  have  found  enough  to  strike  a 
light  with.  I  do  sincerely  believe  that  he  would 
have  found  fun  in  a  joke  of  Senator  —  well,  any 
senator ;  and  that  is  saying  a  great  deal.  I  speak 
of  course,  of  senators  at  Washington. 

Mr.  Lowell  illustrated  his  criticism  by  copious 
quotations  from  "  Hudibras."     He  concluded  thus : 

It  would  not  be  just  to  leave  Butler  without  add- 
ing that  he  was  an  honest  and  ^apparently  disinter- 

144 


BUTLER 

ested  man.  He  wrote  an  indignant  satire  against 
the  vices  of  Charles  the  Second's  court.  Andrew 
Marvel,  the  friend  of  Milton,  and  the  pattern  of  in- 
corruptible Republicanism,  himself  a  finer  poet  and 
almost  as  great  a  wit  as  Butler  —  while  he  speaks 
contemptuously  of  the  controversialists  and  satirists 
of  his  day,  makes  a  special  exception  of  "Hudibras." 
I  can  fancy  John  Bunyan  enjoying  it  furtively,  and 
Milton,  if  he  had  had  such  a  thing  as  fun  in  him, 
would  have  laughed  over  it. 

Many  greater  men  and  greater  poets  have  left 
a  less  valuable  legacy  to  their  countrymen  than 
Butler,  who  has  made  them  the  heirs  of  a  perpetual 
fund  of  good  humor,  which  is  more  nearly  allied  to 
good  morals  than  most  people  suspect. 


10  145 


LECTUEE    IX 

POPE 

{Thursday  Evening,  February  6,  1855) 


IX 


THERE  is  nothing  more  enrious,  whether  in  the 
history  of  individual  men  or  of  nations,  than 
the  reactions  which  occur  at  more  or  less  frequent 
intervals. 

The  human  mind,  both  in  persons  and  societies, 
is  like  a  pendulum  which,  the  moment  it  has 
reached  the  limit  of  its  swing  in  one  direction,  goes 
inevitably  back  as  far  on  the  other  side,  and  so  on 
forever. 

These  reactions  occur  in  everything,  from  the 
highest  to  the  lowest,  from  religion  to  fashions  of 
dress.  The  close  crop  and  sober  doublet  of  the 
Puritan  were  followed  by  the  laces  and  periwigs  of 
Charles  the  Second.  The  scarlet  coats  of  our 
grandfathers  have  been  displaced  by  as  general  a 
blackness  as  if  the  world  had  all  gone  into  mourn- 
ing. Tight  sleeves  alternate  with  loose,  and  the 
full-sailed  expanses  of  Navarino  have  shrunk  to 
those  close-reefed  phenomena  which,  like  Milton's 
Demogorgon,  are  the  name  of  bonnet  without  its 
appearance. 

10*  li'J 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

English  literature,  for  half  a  century  from  the 
Restoration,  showed  the  marks  of  both  reaction 
and  of  a  kind  of  artistic  vassalage  to  France.  From 
the  compulsory  saintship  and  short  hair  of  the 
Roundheads  the  world  rushed  eagerly  toward  a 
little  wickedness  and  a  wilderness  of  wig.  Charles 
the  Second  brought  back  with  him  French  man- 
ners, French  morals,  and  French  taste.  The  fond- 
ness of  the  English  for  foreign  fashions  had  long 
been  noted.  It  was  a  favorite  butt  of  the  satirists 
of  Elizabeth's  da}^  Everybody  remembers  what 
Portia  says  of  the  English  lord :  "  How  oddly  is 
he  suited !  I  think  he  bought  his  doublet  in  Italy, 
his  round  hose  in  France,  his  bonnet  in  Grermany, 
and  his  behavior  everywhere." 

Dryden  is  the  first  eminent  English  poet  whose 
works  show  the  marks  of  French  influence,  and  a 
decline  from  the  ai'tistic  toward  the  artificial,  from 
nature  toward  fashion.  Drj^den  had  known  Milton, 
had  visited  the  grand  old  man  probably  in  that 
"  small  chamber  hung  with  rusty  green,"  where  he 
is  described  as  "  sitting  in  an  elbow-chair,  neatly 
dressed  in  black,  pale  but  not  cadaverous " ;  or 
had  found  him  as  he  "  used  to  sit  in  a  gray,  coarse 
cloth  coat,  at  the  door  of  his  house  near  Bunhill 
Fields,  in  warm,  sunny  weather,  to  enjoy  the  fresh 
air."    Dryden  undertook  to  put  the  "  Paradise  Lost " 

150 


POPE 

into  rhyme,  and  on  Milton's  leave  being  asked,  he 
said,  rather  contemptuously,  "  Ay,  he  may  tag  my 
verses  if  he  will."  He  also  said  that  Dryden  was 
a  "good  rhymist,  but  no  poet."  Dryden  turned 
the  great  epic  into  a  drama  called  "The  State  of 
Innocence,"  and  intended  for  representation  on  the 
stage.  Sir  Walter  Scott  dryly  remarks  that  the 
costume  of  our  first  parents  made  it  rather  an 
awkward  thing  to  bring  them  before  the  footlights. 
It  is  an  illustration  of  the  character  of  the  times 
that  Dryden  makes  Eve  the  mouthpiece  of  some- 
thing very  like  obscenity.  Of  the  taste  shown  by 
such  a  travesty  nothing  need  be  said. 

In  the  poems  of  Dryden  nothing  is  more  strik- 
ing than  the  alternations  between  natural  vigor  and 
warmth  of  temperament  and  the  merest  common- 
places of  diction.  His  strength  lay  chiefly  in  the  un- 
derstanding, and  for  weight  of  sterling  sense  and 
masculine  English,  and  force  of  argument,  I  know 
nothing  better  than  his  prose.  His  mind  was  a  fer- 
vid one,  and  I  think  that  in  his  verse  he  sometimes 
mistook  metrical  enthusiasm  for  poetry.  In  his 
poems  we  find  wit,  fancy,  an  amplitude  of  nature,  a 
rapid  and  graphic  statement  of  the  externals  and 
antitheses  of  character,  and  a  dignified  fluency  of 
verse  rising  sometimes  to  majesty  —  but  not  nuich 
imagination  in  the  high  poetic  meaning  of  the  term. 

151 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

I  have  only  spoken  of  his  poems  at  all  because 
they  stand  midway  between  the  old  era,  which  died 
with  Milton  and  Sir  Thomas  Browne,  and  the  new 
one  which  was  just  beginning.  In  the  sixty  years 
extending  from  1660  to  1720,  more  French  was  im- 
ported into  the  language  than  at  any  other  time 
since  the  Norman  Conquest.  What  is  of  greater 
importance,  it  was  French  ideas  and  sentiments 
that  were  coming  in  now,  and  which  shaped  the 
spirit  and,  through  that,  the  form  of  our  literature. 

The  condition  of  the  English  mind  at  the  begin- 
ning of  the  last  century  was  one  particularly  capa- 
ble of  being  magnetized  from  across  the  Channel. 
The  loyalty  of  everybody,  both  in  politics  and  reli- 
gion, had  been  dislocated.  A  generation  of  mate- 
rialists was  to  balance  the  over-spiritualism  of  the 
Puritans.  The  other  world  had  had  its  turn  long 
enough,  and  now  this  world  was  to  have  its  chance. 
There  seems  to  have  been  a  universal  skepticism, 
and  in  its  most  dangerous  form  —  that  is,  united 
with  a  universal  pretense  of  conformity.  There 
was  an  unbelief  that  did  not  believe  even  in  itself. 
Dean  Swift,  who  looked  forward  to  a  bishopric, 
could  wi'ite  a  book  whose  moral,  if  it  had  any,  was 
that  one  religion  was  about  as  good  as  another,  and 
accepted  a  cure  of  souls  when  it  was  doubtful  if  he 
thought  men  had  any  souls  to  be  saved,  or,  at  any 

152 


POPE 

rate,  tliat  they  were  worth  saving  if  they  had.  The 
answer  which  Pulci's  Margutte  makes  to  Morgante^ 
when  he  asks  him  if  he  believed  in  Christ  or  Ma- 
homet, would  have  expressed  well  enough  the  creed 
of  the  majority  of  that  generation : 

Margutte  answered  then,  To  tell  thee  truly, 
My  faith  in  black  's  no  greater  than  in  azure ; 

But  I  believe  in  capons,  roast  meat,  bouilli, 
And  above  all  in  wine  —  and  carnal  pleasure. 

It  was  impossible  that  anything  truly  great —  ' 
great,  I  mean,  on  the  moral  and  emotional  as  well 
as  on  the  intellectual  sides  —  could  be  produced  in 
such  a  generation.  But  something  intellectually 
great  could  be,  and  was.  The  French  mind,  always 
stronger  in  the  perceptive  and  analytic  than  in  the 
imaginative  faculty,  loving  precision,  grace,  and 
fineness,  had  brought  wit  and  fancy,  and  the  elegant 
arts  of  society,  to  the  perfection,  almost,  of  science. 
Its  ideal  in  literature  was  to  combine  the  appear- 
ance of  carelessness  and  gayety  of  thought  with 
intellectual  exactness  of  statement.  Its  influence, 
then,  in  Englisli  literature  will  appear  chiefly  in 
neatness  and  facility  of  expression,  in  point  of  epi- 
grammatic compactness  of  phrase,  and  these  in  con- 
veying conventional   rather   than   universal  expe- 

153 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

riences;  in  speaking  for  good  society  rather  than 
for  man. 

Thus  far  in  English  poetry  we  have  fonnd  life 
represented  by  Chaucer,  the  real  life  of  men  and 
women ;  the  ideal  or  interior  life  as  it  relates  to 
this  world,  by  Spenser;  what  may  be  called  ima- 
ginative life,  by  Shakspeare;  the  religious  senti- 
ment, or  interior  life  as  it  relates  to  the  other 
world,  by  Milton.  But  everything  aspires  toward 
a  rhythmical  utterance  of  itself,  and  accordingly 
the  intellect  and  life,  as  it  relates  to  what  may  be 
called  the  world,  were  waiting  for  their  poet.  They 
found  or  made  a  most  apt  one  in  Alexander  Pope. 

He  stands  for  perfectness  of  intellectual  expres- 
sion, and  it  is  a  striking  instance  how  much  suc- 
cess and  permanence  of  reputation  depend  upon 
conscientious  and  laborious  finish  as  well  as  upon 
natural  endowments. 

I  confess  that  I  come  to  the  treatment  of  Pope 
with  diffidence.  I  was  brought  up  in  the  old  super- 
stition that  he  was  the  greatest  poet  that  ever  lived, 
and  when  I  came  to  find  that  I  had  instincts  of  my 
own,  and  my  mind  was  brought  in  contact  with  the 
apostles  of  a  more  esoteric  doctrine  of  poetry,  I  felt 
that  ardent  desire  for  smashing  the  idols  I  had  been 
brought  up  to  worship,  without  any  regard  to  their 
artistic  beauty,  which  characterizes  youthful  zeal. 

154 


POPE 

What  was  it  to  me  that  Fope  was  a  master  of  style? 
I  felt,  as  Addison  says  in  his  "Freeholder"  in  an- 
swering an  argument  in  favor  of  the  Pretender  be- 
cause he  could  speak  English  and  George  I  could 
not,  "  that  I  did  not  wish  to  be  tyrannized  over  in 
the  best  English  that  was  ever  spoken."  There  was 
a  time  when  I  could  not  read  Pope,  but  disliked 
him  by  instinct,  as  old  Roger  Ascham  seems  to 
have  felt  about  Italy  when  he  says :  "  I  was  once 
in  Italy  myself,  but  I  thank  God  my  abode  there 
was  only  nine  days." 

But  Pope  fills  a  very  important  place  in  the  his- 
tory of  English  poetry,  and  must  be  studied  by 
every  one  who  would  come  to  a  clear  knowledge  of 
it.  I  have  since  read  every  line  that  Pope  ever 
wrote,  and  every  letter  written  by  or  to  him,  and 
that  more  than  once.  If  I  have  not  come  to  the 
conclusion  that  he  is  the  greatest  of  poets,  I  believe 
I  am  at  least  in  a  condition  to  allow  him  every 
merit  that  is  fairly  his.  I  have  said  that  Pope  as  a 
literary  man  represents  precision  and  grace  of  ex- 
pression; but,  as  a  fact,  he  represents  something 
more  —  nothing  less,  namely,  than  one  of  those  ex- 
ternal controversies  of  taste  which  will  last  as  long 
as  the  Imagination  and  Understanding  divide  men 
between  them.  It  is  not  a  matter  to  be  settled  by 
any  amount  of  argument  or  demonstration.     Men 

155 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

are  born  Popists  or  Wordswortliians,  Lockists  or 
Kantists ;  and  there  is  notliing  more  to  be  said  of 
the  matter.  We  do  not  hear  that  the  green  specta- 
cles persuaded  the  horse  into  thinking  that  shav- 
ings were  grass. 

That  reader  is  happiest  whose  mind  is  broad 
enough  to  enjoy  the  natural  school  for  its  nature 
and  the  artificial  for  its  artificiality,  provided  they 
be  only  good  of  their  kind.  At  any  rate,  we  must 
allow  that  a  man  who  can  produce  one  perfect  work 
is  either  a  great  genius  or  a  very  lucky  one.  As 
far  as  we  who  read  are  concerned,  it  is  of  secondary 
importance  which.  And  Pope  has  done  this  in  the 
"  Rape  of  the  Lock."  For  wit,  fancy,  invention,  and 
keeping,  it  has  never  been  surpassed.  I  do  not  say 
that  there  is  in  it  poetry  of  the  highest  order,  or 
that  Pope  is  a  poet  whom  any  one  would  choose  as 
the  companion  of  his  best  hours.  There  is  no  in- 
spiration in  it,  no  trumpet  call ;  but  for  pure  enter- 
tainment it  is  unmatched. 

The  very  earliest  of  Pope's  productions  gives  in- 
dications of  that  sense  and  discretion,  as  well  as 
wit,  which  afterwards  so  eminently  distinguished 
him.  The  facility  of  expression  is  remarkable,  and 
we  find  also  that  perfect  balance  of  metre  which  he 
afterwards  carried  so  far  as  to  be  wearisome.  His 
pastorals  were  written  in  his  sixteenth  year,  and 

156 


POPE 

their  publication  immediately  brought  him  into 
notice.  The  following  four  verses  from  tlie  first 
Pastoral  are  quite  characteristic  in  their  antithetic 
balance : 

You  that,  too  wise  for  pride,  too  good  for  power, 
Enjoy  the  glory  to  be  great  no  more, 
And  carrying  with  you  all  the  world  can  boast, 
To  all  the  world  illustriously  are  lost. 

The  sentiment  is  affected,  and  reminds  one  of 
that  future  period  of  Pope's  correspondence  with 
his  friends,  where  Swift,  his  heart  corroding  with 
disappointed  ambition  at  Dublin,  Bolingbroke  rais- 
ing delusive  turnips  at  his  farm,  and  Pope  pre- 
tending to  disregard  the  lampoons  which  embit- 
tered his  life,  played  together  the  solemn  farce  of 
affecting  to  despise  the  world  which  it  would  have 
agonized  them  to  be  forgotten  by. 

In  Pope's  next  poem,  the  "  Essay  on  Criticism," 
the  wit  and  poet  become  apparent.  It  is  full  of 
clear  thoughts  compactly  expressed.  In  this  poem, 
written  when  Pope  was  only  twenty-one,  occur 
some  of  those  lines  which  have  become  proverbial, 
such  as : 

A  little  learning  is  a  dangerous  thing; 

For  fools  rush  in  where  angels  fear  to  tread ; 

157 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

True  Wit  is  Nature  to  advantage  dressed, 

What  oft  was  thought,  but  ne'er  so  well  expressed ; 

For  each  ill  author  is  as  bad  a  friend. 

lu  all  these  we  notice  that  terseness  in  which  (re- 
gard being  had  to  his  especial  range  of  thought) 
Pope  has  never  been  equaled.  One  cannot  help 
being  struck  also  with  the  singular  discretion  which 
the  poem  gives  evidence  of.  I  do  not  know  where 
to  look  for  another  author  in  whom  it  appeared 
so  early ;  and  considering  the  vivacity  of  his  mind 
and  the  constantly  besetting  temptation  of  his  wit, 
it  is  still  more  wonderful.  In  his  boyish  corre- 
spondence with  poor  old  Wycherly,  one  would  sup- 
pose him  to  be  a  man  and  Wycherly  the  youth. 
Pope's  understanding  was  no  less  vigorous  than  his 
fancy  was  lightsome  and  sprightly. 

I  come  now  to  what  in  itself  would  be  enough  to 
have  immortalized  him  as  a  poet,  the  "  Rape  of  the 
Lock,"  in  which,  indeed,  he  appears  more  purely  as 
a  poet  than  in  any  other  of  his  productions.  Else- 
where he  has  shown  more  force,  more  wit,  more 
reach  of  thought,  but  nowhere  such  a  truly  artistic 
combination  of  elegance  and  fancy.  His  genius 
has  here  found  its  true  direction,  and  the  very  same 
artificiality  which  in  his  Pastorals  was  unpleasing 
heightens  the  effect  and  adds  to  the  general  keep- 

158 


POPE 

ing.  As  truly  as  Shakspeare  is  the  poet  of  man 
as  God  made  him,  dealing  with  great  j)assions  and 
innate  motives,  so  truly  is  Pope  the  poet  of  society, 
the  delineator  of  manners,  the  exposer  of  those  mo- 
tives which  may  be  called  acquired,  whose  spring  is 
in  institutions  and  habits  of  purely  worldly  origin. 

The  whole  poem  more  truly  deserves  the  name 
of  a  creation  than  anything  Pope  ever  wrote.  The 
action  is  confined  to  a  world  of  his  own,  the  super- 
natural agency  is  wholly  of  his  own  contrivance, 
and  nothing  is  allowed  to  overstep  the  limitations 
of  the  subject.  It  ranks  by  itself  as  one  of  the 
purest  works  of  human  fancy.  Whether  that  fancy 
be  truly  poetical  or  not  is  another  matter.  The  per- 
fection of  form  in  the  "  Rape  of  the  Lock  "  is  to  me 
conclusive  evidence  that  in  it  the  natural  genius  of 
Pope  found  fuller  and  freer  expression  than  in  any 
other  of  his  poems.  The  others  are  aggregates  of 
brilliant  passages  rather  than  harmonious  wholes. 

Mr.  Lowell  gave  a  detailed  analysis  of  the  poem, 
with  extracts  of  some  length. 

The  "  Essay  on  Man "  has  been  praised  and  ad- 
mired by  men  of  the  most  opposite  beliefs,  and  men 
of  no  belief  at  all.  Bishops  and  free-thinkers  have 
met  here  on  a  common  ground  of  sympathetic  ap- 
proval. And,  indeed,  there  is  no  particular  faith 
in  it.     It  is  a  droll  medley  of  inconsistent  opinions. 

159 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

It  proves  only  two  things  beyond  a  question :  that 
Pope  was  not  a  great  thinker ;  and  that  wherever 
he  found  a  thought,  no  matter  what,  he  would  ex- 
press it  so  tersely,  so  clearly,  and  with  such  smooth- 
ness of  versification,  as  to  give  it  an  everlasting 
currency.  Hobbes's  unwieldy  "  Leviathan,"  left 
stranded  on  the  shore  of  the  last  age  and  nauseous 
with  the  stench  of  its  selfishness  —  from  this  Pope 
distilled  a  fragrant  oil  with  which  to  fill  the  bril- 
liant lamps  of  his  philosophy,  lamps  like  those  in  the 
tombs  of  alchemists,  that  go  out  the  moment  the 
healthy  air  is  let  in  upon  them.  The  only  positive 
doctrine  in  the  poem  is  the  selfishness  of  Hobbes 
set  to  music,  and  the  pantheism  of  Spinoza  brought 
down  from  mysticism  to  commonplace.  Nothing 
can  be  more  absurd  than  many  of  the  dogmas 
taught  in  the  "  Essay  on  Man." 

The  accuracy  on  which  Pope  prided  himself,  and 
for  which  he  is  commended,  was  not  accuracy  of 
thought  so  much  as  of  expression.  But  the  suppo- 
sition is  that  in  the  "  Essay  on  Man  "  Pope  did  not 
know  what  he  was  writing  himself.  He  was  only 
the  condenser  and  epigrammatizer  of  Bolingbroke 
v/  — a  fitting  St.  John  for  such  a  gospel.    Or  if  he  did 

know,  we  can  account  for  the  contradictions  by 
supposing  that  he  threw  in  some  of  the  commonplace 
moralities  to  conceal  his  real  drift.  Johnson  asserts 

160 


POPE 

that  Bolingbroke  in  private  laughed  at  Pope's  hav- 
ing been  made  the  mouthpiece  of  opinions  which 
he  did  not  hold.  But  this  is  hardly  probable  when 
we  consider  the  relations  between  them.  It  is  giv- 
ing Pope  altogether  too  little  credit  for  intelligence 
to  suppose  that  he  did  not  understand  the  principles 
of  his  intimate  friend. 

Dr.  Warburton  makes  a  rather  lame  attempt  to 
ward  off  the  charge  of  Spinozism  from  the  "  Essay 
on  Man."  He  would  have  found  it  harder  to  show 
that  the  acknowledgment  of  any  divine  revelation 
would  not  overthrow  the  greater  part  of  its  teach- 
ings. If  Pope  intended  by  his  poem  all  that  the 
Bishop  takes  for  granted  in  his  commentary,  we 
must  deny  him  what  is  usually  claimed  as  his  first 
merit  —  clearness.  If  we  did  not,  we  grant  him 
clearness  as  a  writer  at  the  expense  of  sincerity  as 
a  man.  Perhaps  a  more  charitable  solution  of  the 
difficulty  is  that  Pope's  precision  of  thought  was 
not  equal  to  his  polish  of  style. 

But  it  is  in  his  "  Moral  Essays  "  and  part  of  his 
"  Satires "  that  Pope  deserves  the  praise  which  he 
himself  desired  — 

Happily  to  steer 
From  grave  to  gay,  from  lively  to  severe. 
Correct  with  spirit,  eloquent  with  ease, 
Intent  to  reason,  or  polite  to  please. 

11  101 


LECTURES   ON   ENGLISH   POETRY 

Here  Pope  must  be  allowed  to  have  established  a 
style  of  his  own,  iu  which  he  is  without  a  rival. 
One  can  open  upon  wit  and  epigram  at  every  page. 

In  his  epistle  on  the  characters  of  woman,  no  one 
who  has  ever  known  a  noble  woman  will  find  much 
to  please  him.  The  climax  of  his  praise  rather 
degrades  than  elevates : 

O  blest  in  temper,  whose  unclouded  ray 
Can  make  to-morrow  cheerful  as  to-day, 
She  who  can  love  a  sister's  charms,  or  hear 
Sighs  for  a  daughter  with  unwounded  ear, 
She  who  ne'er  answers  till  a  husband  cools. 
Or  if  she  rules  him,  never  shows  she  rules, 
Charms  by  accepting,  by  submitting  sways, 
Yet  has  her  humor  most  when  she  obeys ; 
Let  fops  or  fortune  fly  which  way  they  will. 
Disdains  all  loss  of  tickets,  or  codille, 
Spleen,  vapors,  or  smallpox,  above  them  all ; 
And  mistress  of  herself  though  china  fall. 

The  last  liue  is  very  witty  and  pointed ;  but  con- 
sider what  an  ideal  of  womanly  nobleness  he  must 
have  had  who  praises  his  heroine  for  not  being 
jealous  of  her  daughter. 

It  is  very  possible  that  the  women  of  Pope's  time 
were  as  bad  as  they  could  be,  but  if  Ood  made 
poets  for  anything  it  was  to  keep  alive  the  tradi- 

162 


POPE 

tioDS  of  tlie  pure,  the  holy,  and  the  beautiful.  I 
grant  the  influence  of  the  age,  but  there  is  a  sense 
in  which  the  poet  is  of  no  age,  and  Beauty,  driven 
from  everv  other  home,  will  never  be  an  outcast 
and  a  wanderer  while  there  is  a  poet-nature  left; 
will  never  fail  of  the  tribute  at  least  of  a  song.  It 
seems  to  me  that  Pope  had  a  sense  of  the  nice 
rather  than  of  the  beautiful.  His  nature  delighted 
in  the  blemish  more  than  in  the  charm. 

Personally,  we  know  more  about  Pope  than  about 
any  of  our  poets.  He  kept  no  secret  about  himself. 
If  he  did  not  let  the  cat  out  of  the  bag,  he  always 
contrived  to  give  her  tail  a  pinch  so  that  we  might 
know  she  was  there.  In  spite  of  the  savageness  of 
his  satires,  his  disposition  seems  to  have  been  a 
truly  amiable  one,  and  his  character  as  an  author 
was  as  purely  fictitious  as  his  style.  I  think  that 
there  was  very  little  real  malice  in  him. 

A  great  deal  must  be  allowed  to  Pope  for  the  age 
in  which  he  lived,  and  not  a  little,  I  think,  for  the 
influence  of  Swift.  In  his  own  province  he  still 
stands  unapproachably  alone.  If  to  be  the  greatest 
satirist  of  individual  men  rather  than  of  human  na- 
ture ;  if  to  be  the  highest  expression  which  the  life 
of  court  and  the  ball-room  has  ever  found  in  verse ; 
if  to  have  added  more  phrases  to  our  language  than 
any  other  but  Shakspeare ;  if  to  have  charmed  four 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH   POETRY 

generations  makes  a  man  a  great  poet,  then  he  is 
one.  He  was  the  chief  founder  of  an  artificial  style 
of  writing  which  in  his  hand  was  living  and  power- 
ful because  he  used  it  to  express  artificial  modes  of 
thinking  and  an  artificial  state  of  society.  Mea- 
sured by  any  high  standard  of  imagination,  he  will 
be  found  wanting;  tried  by  any  test  of  wit,  he  is 
unrivaled. 

To  what  fatuities  his  theory  of  correctness  led  in 
the  next  generation,  when  practised  upon  by  men 
who  had  not  his  genius,  I  shall  endeavor  to  show  in 
my  next  lecture. 


164 


LECTUKE   X 

POETIC   DICTION 

{Friday  Evening,  February  9,  1855) 


11* 


X 


]VTO  one  who  has  read  any  early  poems,  of  what- 
l\  ever  nation,  can  have  failed  to  notice  a  fresh- 
ness in  the  language  —  a  sort  of  game  flavor,  as  it 
were  —  that  gradually  wastes  out  of  it  when  poetry 
becomes  domesticated,  so  to  speak,  and  has  grown  to 
be  a  mere  means  of  amusement  both  to  writers  and 
readers,  instead  of  answering  a  deeper  necessity 
iu  their  natures.  Our  Northern  ancestors  symbol- 
ized the  eternal  newness  of  song  by  calling  it  the 
Present,  and  its  delight  by  calling  it  the  drink  of 
Odin. 

There  was  then  a  fierce  democracy  of  words ;  no 
grades  had  then  been  established,  and  no  favored 
ones  advanced  to  the  Upper  House  of  Poetry.  Men 
had  a  meaning,  and  so  their  words  had  to  have  one, 
too.  They  were  not  representatives  of  value,  but 
value  itself.  They  say  that  Valhalla  was  roofed  with 
golden  shields ;  that  w^as  what  they  believed,  and 
in  their  songs  they  called  them  golden  shingles. 
We  should  think  shields  the  more  poetical  word  of 
the  two;  but  to  them  the  poetry  was  in  the  ihhuj, 

167 


LECTURES   ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

and  the  thought  of  it  aud  the  phrase  took  its  life 
and  meaning  from  them. 

It  is  one  result  of  the  admixture  of  foreign  words 
in  our  language  that  we  use  a  great  many  phrases 
without  knowing  the  force  of  them.  There  is  a 
metaphoric  vitality  hidden  in  almost  all  of  them, 
and  we  talk  poetry  as  Moliere's  citizen  did  prose, 
without  ever  suspecting  it.  Formerly  men  named 
things ;  now  we  merely  label  them  to  know  them 
apart.  The  Vikings  called  their  ships  sea-horses, 
just  as  the  Arabs  called  their  camels  ships  of  the 
desert.  Capes  they  called  sea-noses,  without  think- 
ing it  an  undignified  term  which  the  land  would 
resent.  And  still,  where  mountains  and  headlands 
have  the  luck  to  be  baptized  by  uncultivated  per- 
sons, Fancy  stands  godmother.  Old  Greylock,  up 
in  Berkshire,  got  his  surname  before  we  had  State 
geologists  or  distinguished  statesmen.  So  did 
Great  Haystack  and  Saddle-Mountain.  Sailors  give 
good  names,  if  they  have  no  dictionary  aboard,  and 
along  our  coasts,  here  and  there,  the  word  and 
the  thing  agree,  and  therefore  are  poetical.  Mean- 
ing and  poetry  still  cling  to  some  of  our  common 
phrases,  and  the  crow-foot,  mouse-ear,  goat's-beard, 
day's-eye,  heart's-ease,  snow-drop,  and  many  more 
of  their  vulgar  little  fellow-citizens  of  the  wood  and 
roadsides  are  as  happy  as  if   Linnseus   had  never 

168 


POETIC  DICTION 

been  born.  Such  names  have  a  significance  even 
to  one  who  has  never  seen  the  things  they  stand  for, 
but  whose  fancy  would  not  be  touched  about  a  pel- 
argonium unless  he  had  an  acquired  sympathy  with 
it.  Our  "cumuhis"  language,  heaped  together  from 
all  quarters,  is  like  the  clouds  at  sunset,  and  every 
man  finds  something  different  in  a  sentence,  accord- 
ing to  his  associations.  Indeed,  every  language  that 
has  become  a  literary  one  may  be  compared  to  a 
waning  moon,  out  of  which  the  light  of  beauty  fades 
more  and  more.  Only  to  poets  and  lovers  does  it 
repair  itself  from  its  luminous  fountains. 

The  poetical  quality  of  diction  depends  on  the 
force  and  intensity  of  meaning  with  which  it  is 
employed.  We  are  all  of  us  full  of  latent  signifi- 
cance, and  let  a  poet  have  but  the  power  to  touch 
us,  we  forthwith  enrich  his  word  with  ourselves, 
pouring  into  his  verse  our  own  lives,  all  our  own 
experience,  and  take  back  again,  without  know- 
ing it,  the  vitality  which  we  had  given  away  out  of 
ourselves.  Put  passion  enough  into  a  word,  and 
no  matter  what  it  is  it  becomes  poetical ;  it  is  no 
longer  what  it  was,  but  is  a  messenger  from  original 
man  to  original  man,  an  ambassador  from  royal 
Thee  to  royal  Me,  and  speaks  to  us  from  a  level  of 
equality.  Pope,  who  did  not  scruple  to  employ  the 
thoughts  of  Billingsgate,  is  very  fastidious  about 

109 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

the  dress  they  come  in,  and  claps  a  tawdry  livery- 
coat  on  them,  that  they  may  be  fit  for  the  service 
of  so  fine  a  gentleman.  He  did  not  mind  being 
coarse  in  idea,  but  it  would  have  been  torture  to 
him  to  be  thought  commonplace.  The  sin  of  com- 
position which  he  dreaded  was. 

Lest  ten  low  words  should  creep  hi  one  dull  line. 

But  there  is  no  more  startling  proof  of  the  ge- 
nius of  Shakspeare  than  that  he  always  lifts  the 
language  up  to  himself,  and  never  thinks  to  raise 
himself  atop  of  it.  If  he  has  need  of  the  service  of 
what  is  called  a  low  word,  he  takes  it,  and  it  is  re- 
markable how  many  of  his  images  are  borrowed  out 
of  the  street  and  the  workshop.  His  pen  ennobled 
them  all,  and  we  feel  as  if  they  had  been  knighted 
for  good  service  in  the  field.  Shakspeare,  as  we  all 
know  (for  does  not  Mr.  Voltaire  say  so  ?),  was  a  vul- 
gar kind  of  fellow,  but  somehow  or  other  his  ge- 
nius will  carry  the  humblest  things  up  into  the  air 
of  heaven  as  easily  as  Jove's  eagle  bore  Ganymede. 

Whatever  is  used  with  a  great  meaning,  and  con- 
veys that  meaning  to  others  in  its  full  intensity,  is 
no  longer  common  and  ordinary.  It  is  this  which 
gives  their  poetic  force  to  symbols,  no  matter  how 
low  their  origin.  The  blacksmith's  apron,  once 
made  the  royal  standard  of  Persia,  can  fill  armies 

170 


POETIC  DICTION 

with  enthusiasm  and  is  as  good  as  the  oriflamme 
of  France.  A  broom  is  no  very  noble  thing  in  it- 
self, but  at  the  mast-head  of  a  brave  old  De  Euyter, 
or  in  the  hands  of  that  awful  shape  which  Dion 
the  Syracusan  saw,  it  becomes  poetical.  And  so 
the  emblems  of  the  tradesmen  of  Antwerp,  which 
they  bore  upon  their  standards,  pass  entirely  out  of 
the  prosaic  and  mechanical  by  being  associated  with 
feelings  and  deeds  that  were  great  and  momentous. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  read  a  poem  by  Dr.  Donne  en- 
titled "  The  Separation." 

As  respects  Diction,  that  becomes  formal  and 
technical  when  poetry  has  come  to  be  considered  an 
artifice  rather  than  an  art,  and  when  its  sole  object 
is  to  revive  certain  pleasurable  feelings  already 
conventional,  instead  of  originating  new  sources  of 
delight.  Then  it  is  truly  earth  to  earth ;  dead  lan- 
guage used  to  bury  dead  emotion  in.  This  kind  of 
thing  was  carried  so  far  by  the  later  Scandinavian 
poets  that  they  compiled  a  dictionary  of  the  meta- 
phors used  by  the  elder  Skalds  (whose  songs  Avere 
the  utterance  of  that  within  them  which  would  be 
spoken),  and  satisfied  themselves  with  a  new  ar- 
rangement of  them.  Inspiration  was  taught,  as  we 
see  French  advertised  to  be,  in  six  lessons. 

171 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

In  narrative  and  descriptive  poetry  we  feel  that 
proper  keeping  demands  a  certain  choice  and  lux- 
ury of  words.  The  question  of  propriety  becomes 
one  of  prime  importance  here.  Certain  terms  have 
an  acquired  imaginative  value  from  the  associations 
they  awake  in  us.  Certain  words  are  more  musical 
than  others.  Some  rhymes  are  displeasing ;  some 
measures  wearisome.  Moreover,  there  are  words 
which  have  become  indissolubly  entangled  with  lu- 
dicrous or  mean  ideas.  Hence  it  follows  that  there 
is  such  a  thing  as  Poetic  Diction,  and  it  was  this 
that  Milton  was  thinking  of  when  he  spoke  of 
making  our  English  "  search  her  coffers  round." 

I  will  illustrate  this.  Longfellow's  "Evangeline" 
opens  with  a  noble  solemnity : 

This  is  the  forest  primeval;  the  miirmnring  pines  and 
the  hemlocks, 

Bearded  with  moss  and  in  garments  green,  indistinct  in 
the  twilight, 

Stand  like  the  Druids  of  eld,  with  voices  sad  and  pro- 
phetic, 

Stand  like  harpers  hoar,  with  beards  that  rest  on  their 
bosoms. 

Loud  from  its  rocky  caverns  the  deep- voiced  neighboring 
ocean 

Speaks,  and  in  accents  disconsolate  answers  the  wail  of 
the  forest. 

172 


POETIC  DICTION 

There  is  true  feeling  here,  and  the  sigh  of  the 
piues  is  heard  in  the  verses.  I  can  find  only  one 
epithet  to  hang  a  ciiticisni  on,  and  that  is  the  '"''  ivail 
of  the  forest "  in  the  last  line,  which  is  not  in  keep- 
ing with  the  general  murmur.  Now  I  do  not  sup- 
pose that  the  poet  turned  over  any  vocabulary  to 
find  the  words  he  wanted,  but  followed  his  own  po- 
etic instinct  altogether  in  the  affair.  But  suppose 
for  a  moment,  that  instead  of  being  a  true  poet, 
he  had  been  only  a  gentleman  versifying ;  suppose 
he  had  written,  "  This  is  the  primitive  forest."  The 
prose  meaning  is  the  same,  but  the  poetical  mean- 
ing, the  music,  and  the  cadence  would  be  gone  out 
of  it,  and  gone  forever.  Or  suppose  that,  instead 
of  "garments  green,"  he  had  said  "dresses  green"; 
the  idea  is  identical,  but  the  phrase  would  have 
come  down  from  its  appropriate  remoteness  to  the 
milliner's  counter.  But  not  to  take  such  extreme 
instances,  only  substitute  instead  of  "  harpers 
hoar,"  the  words  "  harpers  gray,"  and  you  lose 
not  only  the  alliteration,  but  the  fine  hoarse  sigh 
of  the  original  epithet,  which  blends  with  it  the 
general  feeling  of  the  passage.  So  if  you  put 
"  sandy  beaches  "  in  the  place  of  "  rocky  caverns," 
you  will  not  mar  the  absolute  truth  to  nature, 
but  you  will  have  forfeited  the  relative  truth  to 
keeping. 

173 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 
When  Bryant  says  so  exquisitely, 

Painted  moths 
Have  tvandered  the  blue  shy  and  died  again, 

we  ruin  the  poetry,  the  sunny  spaciousness  of  the 
image,  without  altering  the  prose  sense,  by  sub- 
stituting 

TLdive  jloivn  through  the  clear  air. 

But  the  words  "  poetic  diction  "  have  acquired  a 
double  meaning,  or  perhaps  I  should  say  there  are 
two  kinds  of  poetic  diction,  the  one  true  and  the 
other  false,  the  one  real  and  vital,  the  other  me- 
chanical and  artificial.  Wordsworth  for  a  time 
confounded  the  two  together  in  one  wrathful  con- 
demnation, and  preached  a  crusade  against  them 
both.  He  wrote,  at  one  time,  on  the  theory  that  the 
language  of  ordinary  life  was  the  true  dialect  of 
poetry,  and  that  one  word  was  as  good  as  another. 
He  seemed  even  to  go  farther  and  to  adopt  the 
Irishman's  notion  of  popular  equality,  that  "one 
man  is  as  good  as  another,  and  a  dale  better,  too." 
He  preferred,  now  and  then,  prosaic  words  and  im- 
ages to  poetical  ones.  But  he  was  not  long  in  find- 
ing his  mistake  and  correcting  it.     One  of  his  most 

174 


POETIC  DICTION 

tender  and  pathetic  poems,  "  We  are  Seven,"  Ijegan 
thus  in  the  first  edition  : 

A  simple  child,  dear  brother  Jim. 

All   England   laughed,   and   in    the    third    edition 

Wordsworth  gave  in  and  left  the  last  half  of  the 

line  blank,  as  it  has  been  ever  since.     If  the  poem 

had  been  a  translation  from  the  Turkish  and  had 

begun, 

A  simple  child,  dear  Ibrahim, 

there  would  have  been  nothing  unpoetical  in  it; 
but  the  "dear  brother  Jim,"  which  would  seem 
natural  enough  at  the  beginning  of  a  familiar  let- 
ter, is  felt  to  be  ludicrously  incongruous  at  the 
opening  of  a  poem. 

To  express  a  profound  emotion,  the  simpler  the 
language  and  the  less  removed  from  the  ordinary 
course  of  life  the  better.  There  is  a  very  striking 
example  of  this  in  Webster's  tragedy  of  "The 
Duchess  of  Malfy."  The  brother  of  the  Duchess 
has  procured  her  murder,  and  when  he  comes  in 
and  sees  the  body  he  merely  says : 

"  Cover  her  face ;  mine  eyes  dazzle ;  she  died  young." 

Horror  could  not  be  better  expressed  than  in 
these  few  words,  and  Webster  has  even  taken  care 

175 


.  ut 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

to  break  up  the  verse  in  such  a  way  that  a  too  en- 
tire consciousness  of  the  metre  may  not  thrust  it- 
self between  us  and  the  bare  emotion  he  intends 
to  convey. 

In  iUustration,  Mr.  Lowell  quoted  from  Shak- 
speare  ("  Henry  Y"),  Marlowe,  Chapman,  Dunbar, 
Beaumont  and  Fletcher,  "Waller,  Young,  and  Caw- 
thorn. 

These  men  [the  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century] 
were  perfectly  conscious  of  the  fact  that  poetry  is 
not  produced  under  an  ordinary  condition  of  the 
mind,  and  accordingly,  when  they  begin  to  grind 
their  barrel-organs,  they  go  through  the  ceremony 
of  invoking  the  Muse,  talk  in  the  blandest  way  of 
divine  rages  and  sacred  flames,  and  one  thing  or 
another,  and  ask  for  holy  fire  to  heat  their  little 
tea-urns  with  as  coolly  as  one  would  borrow  a  luci- 
fer.  They  appeal  ceremoniously  to  the  "sacred 
Nine,"  when  the  only  thing  really  necessary  to  them 
was  the  ability  to  count  as  high  as  the  sacred  ten 
syllables  that  constituted  their  verse.  If  the  Muse 
had  once  granted  their  prayer,  if  she  had  once  un- 
veiled her  awful  front  to  the  poor  fellows,  they 
would  have  hidden  under  their  beds,  every  man 
John  of  them. 

The  eighteenth  century  produced  some  true 
13oets,  but  almost  all,  even  of  them,  were  infected 

176 


POETIC  DICTION 

by  the  prevailing  style.  I  cannot  find  any  name 
that  expresses  it  better  than  the  "  Dick  Swiveller 
style."  As  Dick  always  called  wine  the  "rosy," 
sleep  the  "  balmy,"  and  so  forth,  so  did  these  per- 
fectly correct  gentlemen  always  employ  either  a 
fluent  epithet  or  a  diffuse  paraphrasis  to  express 
the  commonest  emotions  or  ideas.  If  they  wished 
to  say  tea  they  would  have  done  it  thus  : 

Of  China's  herb  the  infusiou  hot  and  mild. 

Coffee  would  be 

The  fragrant  juice  of  Mocha's  kernel  gray, 

or  brown  or  black,  as  the  rhyme  demanded.  A 
boot  is  dignified  into 

The  shining  leather  that  the  leg  encased. 

Wine  is 

The  purple  honor  of  th'  ambrosial  vine. 

All  women  are  "  nymphs,"  carriages  are  "  harnessed 
pomps,"  houses  are  sumptuous  or  humble  "  jiiles," 
as  the  case  may  be,  and  everything  is  purely  tech- 
nical. Of  nature  there  seems  to  have  been  hardlv 
a  tradition.  ^ 

But  instead  of  attempting  to  describe  in  prose  the 

12  177 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH   POETRY 

diluent  diction  which  passed  for  poetic  under  the 
artificial  system  —  which  the  influence  of  Words- 
worth did  more  than  anything  else  to  abolish  and 
destroy  —  I  will  do  it  by  a  few  verses  in  the  same 
style.  Any  subject  will  do  —  a  Lapland  sketch,  we 
will  say : 

Where  far-off  suns  their  fainter  splendors  throw 
O'er  Lapland's  wastes  of  uncongenial  snow, 
Where  giant  icebergs  lift  their  horrent  spires 
And  the  blank  scene  a  gelid  fear  expires, 
Where  oft  the  aurora  of  the  northern  night 
Cheats  with  pale  beams  of  ineffectual  light, 
Where  icy  Winter  broods  o'er  hill  and  plain, 
And  Summer  never  comes,  or  comes  in  vain  ; 
Yet  here,  e'en  here,  kind  Nature  grants  to  man 
A  boon  congenial  with  her  general  plan. 
Though  no  fair  blooms  to  vernal  gales  expand, 
And  smiling  Ceres  shuns  th'  unyieldmg  land, 
Behold,  even  here,  cast  up  a  monstrous  spoil, 
The  sea's  vast  monarch  yields  nutritious  oil, 
Escaped,  |)erchance,  from  where  the  unfeeling  crews 
Dart  the  swift  steel,  and  hempen  coils  unloose. 
He  whirls  impetuous  through  the  crimson  tide. 
Nor  heeds  the  death  that  quivers  in  his  side ; 
Northward  he  rushes  with  impulsive  fin, 
Where  shores  of  crystal  groan  with  ocean's  din. 
Shores  that  will  melt  with  pity's  glow  more  soon 
Than  the  hard  heart  that  launched  the  fierce  harpoon. 

178 


POETIC  DICTION 

In  vain  !  lie  dies  !  yet  not  without  avail 
The  bhibbery  bulk  between  his  nose  and  tail. 
Soon  shall  that  bulk,  in  liquid  amber  stored, 
Shed  smiling  plenty  round  some  Lapland  board. 
Dream  not,  ye  nymphs  that  flutter  round  the  tray 
When  suns  declining  shut  the  door  of  day. 
While  China's  herb,  infused  with  art,  ye  sip, 
And  toast  and  scandal  share  the  eager  lip. 
Dream  not  to  you  alone  that  Life  is  kind, 
Nor  Hvson's  charms  alone  can  soothe  the  mind : 
If  you  are  blest,  ah,  how  more  blest  is  he 
By  kinder  fate  shut  far  from  tears  and  tea, 
Who  marks,  replenished  by  his  duteous  hand. 
Dark  faces  oleaginously  expand ; 
And  while  you  faint  to  see  the  scalding  doom 
Invade  with  stains  the  pride  of  Persia's  loom, 
Happier  in  skins  than  you  in  silks  perhaps, 
Deals  the  bright  train-oil  to  his  little  Lap's. 


179 


LECTUEE    XI 

WORDSWORTH 

{Tuesday  Evening,  February  13,  1855) 


12* 


XI 


A  FEW  remarks  upon  two  of  the  more  distin- 
g'uished  poets  of  the  eighteenth  century  will 
be  a  fitting  introduction  to  Wordsworth,  and,  in- 
deed, a  kind  of  commentary  on  his  poetry.  Of 
two  of  these  poets  we  find  very  evident  traces 
in  him  —  Thomson  and  Cowper  —  of  the  one  in 
an  indiscriminating  love  of  nature,  of  the  other 
in  a  kind  of  domestic  purity,  and  of  both  in  the 
habit  of  treating  subjects  essentially  prosaic,  in 
verse;  whence  a  somewhat  swelling  wordiness  is 
inevitable. 

Thomson  had  the  good  luck  to  be  born  in  Scot- 
land, and  to  be  brought  up  by  parents  remark- 
able for  simplicity  and  piety  of  life.  Living  in  the 
country  till  he  was  nearlj^  twenty,  he  learned  to 
love  natural  beauty,  and  must  have  been  an  atten- 
tive student  of  scenery.  That  he  had  true  instincts 
in  poetry  is  proved  by  his  making  Milton  and 
Spenser  his  models.     He  was  a  man  of  force  and 

183 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

originality,  and  English  poetry  owes  him  a  large 
debt  as  the  first  who  stood  out  both  in  precept  and 
practice  against  the  vicious  artificial  style  which 
then  reigned,  and  led  the  way  back  to  purer  tastes 
and  deeper  principles.  He  was  a  man  perfectly 
pure  in  life;  the  associate  of  eminent  and  titled 
personages,  without  being  ashamed  of  the  little  mil- 
liner's shop  of  his  sisters  in  Edinburgh ;  a  lover  of 
freedom,  and  a  poet  who  never  lost  a  friend,  nor 
ever  wrote  a  line  of  which  he  could  repent.  The 
licentiousness  of  the  age  could  not  stain  him.  His 
poem  of  "  Winter  "  was  published  a  year  before  the 
appearance  of  the  "  Dunciad." 

Thomson's  style  is  not  equal  to  his  conceptions. 
It  is  generally  lumbering  and  diffuse,  and  rather 
stilted  than  lofty.  It  is  very  likely  that  his  Scotch 
birth  had  something  to  do  with  this,  and  that  he 
could  not  write  English  with  that  unconsciousness 
without  which  elegance  is  out  of  the  question  —  for 
there  can  be  no  true  elegance  without  freedom. 
Burns's  English  letters  and  poems  are  examples 
of  this. 

But  there  are  passages  in  Thomson's  poems  full 
of  the  truest  feelings  for  nature,  and  gleams  of  pure 
imagination. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  read  a  passage  from  "  Summer," 
which,  he  said,  illustrated  better  than  almost  any 

184 


WORDSWORTH 

other  his  excellences  and  defects.     It  is  a  descrip- 
tion of  a  storm,  beginning: 

At  first  heard  solemn  o'er  the  verge  of  Heaven 
The  tempest  growls. 

This  is  fustian  patched  with  cloth  of  gold.  The 
picture,  fine  as  it  is  in  parts,  is  too  much  frittered 
with  particulars.  The  poet's  imagination  does  not 
seem  powerful  enough  to  control  the  language. 
There  is  no  autocratic  energy,  but  the  sentences 
are  like  unruly  barons,  each  doing  what  he  likes  in 
his  own  province.  Many  of  them  are  prosaic  and 
thoroughly  ifHpicturesque,  and  come  under  the  fatal 
condemnation  of  being  fiat.  Yet  throughout  the 
passage. 

The  unconquerable  genius  struggles  through 

half- suffocated  in  a  cloud  of  words. 

But  the  metre  is  hitchy  and  broken,  and  seems 
to  have  no  law  but  that  of  five  feet  to  the  verse. 
There  is  no  Pegasean  soar,  but  the  unwieldy  gallop 
of  an  ox.  The  imagination,  which  Thomson  un- 
doubtedly had,  contrasted  oddly  with  the  lumber- 
ing vehicle  of  his  diction.  He  takes  a  bushel- 
basket  to  bring  home  an  egg  in.  In  him  poetry 
and  prose  entered  into  partnership,  and  poetry  was 

185 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

the  sleeping  partner  who  comes  down  now  and 
then  to  see  how  the  business  is  getting  on.  But  he 
had  the  soul  of  a  poet,  and  that  is  the  main  thing. 

Of  Grray  and  Collins  there  is  no  occasion  to  speak 
at  length  in  this  place.  Both  of  them  showed  true 
poetic  imagination.  In  Grray  it  was  thwarted  by 
an  intellectual  timidity  that  looked  round  continu- 
ally for  precedent;  and  Collins  did  not  live  long 
enough  to  discharge  his  mind  thoroughly  of  classic 
pedantry;  but  both  of  them  broke  away  from  the 
reigning  style  of  decorous  frigidity.  Collins's  "Ode 
to  Evening"  is  enough  to  show  that  he  had  a  sin- 
cere love  of  nature  —  but  generally  the  scenery  of 
both  is  borrowed  from  books. 

In  Cowper  we  find  the  same  over-minuteness  in 
describing  which  makes  Thomson  wearisome,  but 
relieved  by  a  constant  vivacity  of  fancy  which  in 
Thomson  was  entirely  wanting.  But  Cowper  more 
distinctly  preluded  Wordsworth  in  his  delight  in 
simple  things,  in  finding  themes  for  his  song  in  the 
little  incidents  of  his  own  fireside  life,  or  his  daily 
walks,  and  especially  in  his  desire  to  make  poetry  a 
means  of  conveying  moral  truth.  The  influence  of 
Cowper  may  be  traced  clearly  in  some  of  Words- 
worth's minor  poems  of  pure  fancy,  and  there  is 
one  poem  of  his  —  that  on  "  Yardly  Oak"  —  which 
is  almost  perfectly  Wordsworthian.    But  Cowper 

186 


WORDSWORTH 

rarely  rises  above  the  region  of  fancy,  and  he  often 
applied  verse  to  themes  that  would  not  sing.  His 
poetry  is  never  more  than  agreeable,  and  never 
reaches  down  to  the  deeper  sources  of  delight. 
Cowper  was  one  of  those  men  who,  wanting  a  vig- 
orous understanding  to  steady  the  emotional  part 
of  his  nature,  may  be  called  peculiar  rather  than 
original.  Great  poetry  can  never  be  made  out  of 
a  morbid  temperament,  and  great  wits  are  com- 
monly the  farthest  removed  from  madness.  But 
Cowper  had  at  least  the  power  of  believing  that  his 
own  thoughts  and  pleasures  were  as  good,  and  as 
fit  for  poetry,  as  those  of  any  man,  no  matter  how 
long  he  had  enjoyed  the  merit  of  being  dead. 

The  closing  years  of  the  eighteenth  century  have 
something  in  common  with  those  of  the  sixteenth. 
The  air  was  sparkling  with  moral  and  intellectual 
stimulus.  The  tremble  of  the  French  Revolution 
ran  through  all  Europe,  and  probably  England, 
since  the  time  of  the  great  Puritan  revolt,  had  never 
felt  such  a  thrill  of  national  and  indigenous  senti- 
ment as  during  the  Napoleonic  wars.  It  was  a  time 
fitted  to  give  birth  to  something  original  in  lit- 
erature. If  from  the  collision  of  minds  sparks  of 
wit  and  fancy  fly  out,  the  shock  and  jostle  of  great 
events,  of  world-shaping  ideas,  and  of  nations  who 
do  their  work  without  knowing  it,  strike  forth  a 

187 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

fire  that  kindles  heart  and  brain  and  tongue   to 
more  inspired  conceptions  and  utterances. 

It  was  fortunate  for  Wordsworth  that  he  had  his 
breeding  in  the  country,  and  not  only  so,  but  among 
the  gi-andest  scenery  of  England.  His  earliest  as- 
sociates were  the  mountains,  lakes,  and  streams  of 
his  native  district,  and  the  scenery  with  which  his 
mind  was  stored  during  its  most  impressionable 
period  was  noble  and  pure.  The  people,  also,  among 
whom  he  grew  up  were  a  simple  and  hardy  race, 
who  kept  alive  the  traditions  and  many  of  the 
habits  of  a  more  picturesque  time.  There  was  also 
a  general  equality  of  condition  which  kept  life  from 
becoming  conventional  and  trite,  and  which  cher- 
ished friendly  human  sympathies.  When  death 
knocked  at  any  door  of  the  hamlet,  there  was  an 
echo  from  every  fireside ;  and  a  wedding  dropped  an 
orange  blossom  at  every  door.  There  was  not  a 
grave  in  the  little  churchyard  but  had  its  story; 
not  a  crag  or  glen  or  aged  tree  without  its  legend. 
The  occupations  of  the  people,  w^ho  were  mostly 
small  farmers  and  shepherds,  were  such  as  fostered 
independence  and  originality  of  character.  And 
where  everybody  knew  everybody,  and  everybody's 
father  had  known  everybody's  father,  and  so  on 
immemorially,  the  interest  of  man  in  man  was  not 
likely  to  become  a  matter  of  cold  hearsay  and  dis- 

188 


WORDSWORTH 

taut  report.  It  was  here  that  Wordsworth  learned 
not  only  to  love  the  simplicity  of  nature,  but  like- 
wise that  homely  and  earnest  manliness  which 
gives  such  depth  and  sincerity  to  his  poems. 
Travel,  intercourse  with  society,  scholarly  culture, 
nothing  could  cover  up  or  obliterate  those  early  im- 
pressions. They  widened  with  the  range  of  his 
knowledge  and  added  to  his  power  of  expression, 
but  they  never  blunted  that  fine  instinct  in  him 
which  enables  him  always  to  speak  directly  to  men 
and  to  gentleman,  or  scholar,  or  citizen.  It  was 
this  that  enabled  his  poetry  afterwards  to  con- 
quer all  the  reviews  of  England.  The  great  art  of 
being  a  man,  the  sublime  mystery  of  being  your- 
self, is  something  to  which  one  must  be  appren- 
ticed early. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  gave  an  outline  of  Wordsworth's 
personal  history  and  character. 

As  a  man  we  fancy  him  just  in  the  least  degree 
uninteresting  —  if  the  horrid  word  must  come  out 
—  why,  a  little  bit  of  a  bore.  One  must  regard  him 
as  a  prophet  in  order  to  have  the  right  kind  of  feel- 
ing toward  him ;  and  prophets  are  excellent  for 
certain  moods  of  mind,  but  perhaps  are  creatures 

Too  bright  and  good 
For  liiiman  nature's  daily  food. 
189 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

I  fancy  from  what  I  have  heard  from  those  who 
knew  him  that  he  had  a  tremendous  prose-power, 
and  that,  with  his  singing-robes  off,  he  was  dry  and 
stiff  as  a  figure-head.  He  had  a  purity  of  mind 
approaching  almost  to  prudery,  and  a  pupil  of  Dr. 
Arnold  told  me  he  had  heard  him  say  once  at  din- 
ner that  he  thought  the  first  line  of  Keats's  ode 
to  a  "  Grecian  Urn  "  indecorous.  The  boys  consid- 
ered him  rather  slow.  There  was  something  rocky 
and  unyielding  in  his  mind ;  something  that,  if  we 
found  it  in  a  man  we  did  not  feel  grateful  to  and 
respect,  we  should  call  hard.  Even  his  fancy  some- 
times is  glittering  and  stiff,  like  crystallizations  in 
granite.  But  at  other  times  how  tender  and  deli- 
cate and  dewy  from  very  contrast,  like  harebells 
growing  in  a  crag-cleft ! 

There  seem  to  have  been  two  distinct  natures  in 
him  —  Wordsworth  the  poet,  and  Wordsworth  the 
man  who  used  to  talk  about  Wordsworth  the  poet. 
One  played  a  kind  of  Baruch  to  the  other's  Jeremiah, 
and  thought  a  great  deal  of  his  master  the  prophet. 
Baruch  was  terrifically  ?<;?inspired,  and  was  in  the 
haV>it  of  repeating  Jeremiah's  poems  at  rather  more 
length  than  was  desired,  selecting  commonly  the 
parts  which  pleased  him,  Baruch,  the  best.  Baruch 
Wordsworth  used  to  praise  Jeremiah  Wordsworth, 
and  used  to  tell  entertaining  anecdotes  of  him, — 

190 


WORDSWORTH 

how  he  one  day  saw  an  old  woman  and  the  next 
did  not^  and  so  came  home  and  dictated  some 
verses  on  this  remarkable  phenomenon ;  and  how 
another  day  he  saw  a  cow. 

Bnt  in  reading  Wordsworth  we  must  skip  all  the 
Baruch  interpolations,  and  cleave  wholly  to  Jere- 
miah, who  is  truly  inspired  and  noble  —  more  so 
than  any  modern.  We  are  too  near  him,  perhaps, 
to  be  able  wholly  to  separate  the  personal  from  the 
poeticaL  I  acknowledge  that  I  reverence  the  noble 
old  man  both  for  his  grand  life  and  his  poems,  that 
are  worthy  expressions  of  it.  But  a  lecturer  is 
under  bonds  to  speak  what  he  believes  to  be  the 
truth.  While  I  think  that  Wordsworth's  poetry  is 
a  thing  by  itself,  both  in  its  heights  and  depths, 
something  sacred  and  apart,  I  cannot  but  acknow- 
ledge that  his  prosing  is  sometimes  a  gift  as  pe- 
culiar to  himself.  Like  old  Ben  Jonson,  he  appar- 
ently wished  that  a  great  deal  of  what  he  wrote 
should  be  called  "works."  Especially  is  this  true 
of  his  larger  poems,  like  the  "  Excursion  "  and  the 
"  Prelude."  However  small,  however  commonjilace 
the  thought,  the  ponderous  machine  of  his  verse 
runs  on  like  a  railway  train  that  must  start  at  a 
certain  hour  though  the  only  passenger  be  the  boy 
that  cries  lozenges.  He  seems  to  have  thought  that 
inspiration  was  something  that  could  be  turned  on 

191 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

like  steam.  Walter  Savage  Lanclor  told  me  that  he 
once  said  to  Wordsworth :  "  Mr.  Wordsworth,  a  man 
may  mix  as  much  poetry  with  prose  as  he  likes, 
and  it  will  make  it  the  better;  but  the  moment  he 
mixes  a  bit  of  prose  with  his  poetry,  it  precipi- 
tates the  whole."  Wordsworth,  he  added,  never 
forgave  him. 

There  was  a  great  deal  in  Wordsworth's  character 
that  reminds  us  of  Milton;  the  same  self-reliance, 
the  same  purity  and  loftiness  of  purpose,  and,  I  sus- 
pect, the  same  personal  dryness  of  temperament 
and  seclusion  of  self.  He  seems  to  have  had  a  pro- 
founder  imagination  than  Milton,  but  infinitely  less 
music,  less  poetical  faculty.  I  am  not  entirely  satis- 
fied of  the  truth  of  the  modern  philosophy  which, 
if  a  man  knocks  another  on  the  head,  transfers  all 
the  guilt  to  some  peccant  bump  on  his  own  occiput 
or  sinciput ;  but  if  we  measure  Wordsworth  in  this 
way,  I  feel  as  if  he  had  plenty  of  forehead,  but  that 
he  wanted  hind-head,  and  would  have  been  more 
entirely  satisfactory  if  he  had  had  one  of  the  philo- 
something-or-other. 

It  cannot  be  denied  that  in  Wordsworth  the  very 
highest  powers  of  the  poetical  mind  were  associ- 
ated with  a  certain  tendency  to  the  diffuse  and 
commonplace.  It  is  in  the  Understanding  (always 
prosaic)  that  the  great  golden  veins  of  his  imagina- 

192 


WORDSWORTH 

tion  are  embedded.  He  wrote  too  mucli  to  write 
always  well ;  for  it  is  not  a  great  Xerxes  army  of 
words,  but  a  compact  Greek  ten  thousand  that 
march  safely  down  to  i)Osterity.  He  sets  tasks 
to  the  divine  faculty,  which  is  much  the  same  as 
trying  to  make  Jove's  eagle  do  the  service  of  a 
clucking  hen.  Throughout  the  "  Prelude  "  and  the 
"  Excursion,"  he  seems  striving  to  bind  the  wizard 
imagination  with  the  sand-ropes  of  dry  disquisi- 
tion, and  to  have  forgotten  the  potent  spell-word 
which  would  make  the  particulars  adhere.  There 
is  an  arenaceous  quality  in  the  style  which  makes 
progress  wearisome ;  yet  with  what  splendors  of 
mountain-sunsets  are  we  not  rewarded !  What 
golden  rounds  of  verse  do  we  not  see  stretching 
heavenward,  with  angels  ascending  and  descend- 
ing !  What  haunting  melodies  hover  around  us, 
deep  and  eternal,  like  the  undying  barytone  of  the 
sea !  And  if  we  are  compelled  to  fare  through 
sands  and  desert  wilderness,  how  often  do  we  not 
hear  airy  shapes  that  syllable  our  names  with  a 
startling  personal  appeal  to  our  highest  conscious- 
ness and  our  noblest  aspiration,  such  as  we  might 
wait  for  in  vain  in  any  other  poet. 

Take  from  Wordsworth  all  which  an  honest  criti- 
cism cannot  but  allow,  and  what  is  left  will  show 
how  truly  great   he  was.     He   had  no  humor,   no 

13  103 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

di'amatic  power,  and  his  temperament  was  of  that 
dry  and  juiceless  quality  that  in  all  his  published 
correspondence  you  shall  not  find  a  letter,  but  only 
essays.  If  we  consider  carefully  where  he  was 
most  successful,  we  shall  find  that  it  was  not  so 
much  in  description  of  natural  scenery,  or  delinea- 
tion of  character,  as  in  vivid  expression  of  the  ef- 
fect produced  by  external  objects  and  events  upon 
his  own  mind.  His  finest  passages  are  always 
monologues.  He  had  a  fondness  for  particulars, 
and  there  are  parts  of  his  poems  which  remind  us 
of  local  histories  in  the  undue  importance  given  to 
trivial  matter.  He  was  the  historian  of  Words- 
worthshire.  This  power  of  particularization  (for  it 
is  as  truly  a  power  as  generalization)  is  what  gives 
such  vigor  and  greatness  to  single  lines  and  senti- 
ments of  Wordsworth,  and  to  poems  developing  a 
single  thought  or  word.  It  was  this  that  made  him 
so  fond  of  the  sonnet.  His  mind  had  not  that 
reach  and  elemental  movement  of  Milton's  which, 
like  the  trade-winds,  gathered  to  itself  thoughts 
and  images  like  stately  fleets  from  every  quarter; 
some,  deep  with  silks  and  spicery,  come  brooding 
over  the  silent  thunders  of  their  battailous  arma- 
ments, but  all  swept  forward  in  their  destined 
track,  over  the  long  billows  of  his  verse,  every  inch 
of  canvas  strained  by  the  unifying  breath  of  their 

194 


WORDSWORTH 

common  epic  impulse.  It  was  an  organ  that  Milton 
mastered,  mighty  in  compass,  capable  equally  of 
the  trumpet's  ardors,  or  the  slim  delicacy  of  the 
flute ;  and  sometimes  it  bursts  forth  in  great 
crashes  through  his  prose,  as  if  he  touched  it  for 
solace  in  the  intervals  of  his  toil.  If  Wordsworth 
sometimes  puts  the  trumpet  to  his  lips,  yet  he  lays  it 
aside  soon  and  willingly  for  his  appropriate  instru- 
ment,  the  pastoral  reed.  And  it  is  not  one  that 
grew  by  any  vulgar  stream,  but  that  which  Apollo 
breathed  through  tending  the  flocks  of  Admetus, 
that  which  Pan  endowed  with  every  melody  of  the 
visible  universe,  the  same  in  which  the  soul  of  the 
despairing  nymph  took  refuge  and  gifted  with  her 
dual  nature,  so  that  ever  and  anon,  amid  notes  of 
human  joy  and  sorrow,  there  comes  suddenly  a 
deeper  and  almost  awful  tone,  thrilling  us  into  dim 
consciousness  of  a  forgotten  divinity. 

Of  no  other  poet,  except  Shakspeare,  have  so 
many  phrases  become  household  words  as  of 
Wordsworth.  If  Pope  has  made  current  more  epi- 
grams of  worldly  wisdom,  to  Wordsworth  belongs 
the  nobler  praise  of  having  defined  for  us,  and 
given  us  for  a  daily  possession,  those  faint  and 
vague  suggestions  of  other-worldliness  of  whose 
gentler  ministry  with  our  baser  nature  the  hurry 
and  bustle  of  life  scarcely  ever  allowed  us  to  be 

195 


^ 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

couscions.  He  lias  won  for  himself  a  secure  im- 
mortality by  a  depth  of  intuition  which  makes  only 
the  best  minds  at  their  best  hours  worthy,  or  indeed 
capable,  of  his  companionship,  and  by  a  homely 
sincerity  of  human  sympathy  which  reaches  the 
humblest  heart.  Our  language  owes  him  gratitude 
for  the  purity  and  abstinence  of  his  style,  and  we 
who  speak  it,  for  having  emboldened  us  to  trust 
ourselves  to  take  delight  in  simple  things,  and  to 
trust  ourselves  to  our  own  instincts.  And  he  hath 
his  reward.     It  needs  not  to 

Bid  Beaiuiiont  lie 
A  little  farther  off  to  make  him  room, 

for  there  is  no  fear  of  crowding  in  that  little  so- 
ciety with  whom  he  is  now  enrolled  as  the  fifth  in 
the  succession  of  the  great  English  poets. 


196 


LECTrEE  xn 


THE   FUNCTION   OF   THE   POET 

{Friday  Evening,  Fehnianj  16,  1855) 


u 


XII 


WHETHER,  as  some  philosophers  here  assume, 
we  possess  only  the  fragments  of  a  gTeat 
cycle  of  knowledge,  in  whose  center  stood  the 
pi'imeval  man  in  friendly  relation  with  the  ])owers 
of  the  universe,  and  build  our  hovels  out  of  the  ruins 
of  our  ancestral  palace;  or  whether,  according  to 
the  developing  theory  of  others,  we  are  rising  grad- 
ually and  have  come  up  from  an  atom  instead  of 
descending  from  an  Adam,  so  that  the  proudest 
pedigree  might  run  up  to  a  barnacle  or  a  zoophyte 
at  last,  are  questions  which  will  keep  for  a  good 
many  centuries  yet.  Confining  myself  to  what  lit- 
tle we  can  learn  from  History,  we  find  triV)es  rising 
slowly  out  of  barbarism  to  a  higher  or  lower  point 
of  culture  and  civility,  and  everywhere  the  poet  also 
is  found  under  one  name  or  another,  changing  in 
certain  outward  respects,  but  essentially  the  same. 
But  however  far  we  go  back,  we  shall  find  this 
also  —  that  the  poet  and  the  priest  were  united 
originally  in  the  same  person :  which  means  that 

199 


LECTURES  ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

the  poet  was  he  who  was  conscious  of  the  world  of 
sph'it  as  well  as  that  of  sense,  and  was  the  am- 
bassador of  the  gods  to  men.  This  was  his  highest 
function,  and  hence  his  name  of  seer. 

I  suppose  the  word  epic  originally  meant  nothing 
more  than  this,  that  the  poet  was  the  person  who 
was  the  greatest  master  of  speech.  His  were  the 
susa  zrsf.osvta,  the  true  winged  words  that  could  fly 
down  the  unexplored  future  and  carry  thither  the 
names  of  ancestral  heroes,  of  the  brave,  and  wise, 
and  good.  It  was  thus  that  the  poet  could  reward 
virtue,  and,  by  and  by,  as  society  grew  more  com- 
plex, could  burn  in  the  brand  of  shame.  This  is 
Homer's  character  of  Demodocus  in  the  eighth 
book  of  the  ''Odyssey," 

When  the  Muse  loved  and  gave  the  good  and  ill, 

the  gift  of  conferring  good  or  evil  immortality. 

The  first  histories  were  in  verse,  and,  sung  as 
they  were  at  the  feasts  and  gatherings  of  the  peo- 
ple, they  awoke  in  men  the  desire  of  fame,  which 
is  the  first  promoter  of  courage  and  self-trust,  be- 
cause it  teaches  men  by  degrees  to  appeal  from  the 
present  to  the  future.  We  may  fancy  what  the 
influence  of  the  early  ex)ics  was  when  they  were 
recited  to  men  who  claimed  the  heroes  celebrated 
in  them  for  theii'  ancestors,  by  what  Bouchardon, 

200 


THE   FUNCTION   OF   THE   POET 

the  sculptor,  said  only  two  centuries  ago :  "  When 
I  read  Homer  I  feel  as  if  I  were  twenty  feet  high." 

Nor  have  poets  lost  their  power  over  the  future 
in  modern  times.  Dante  lifts  up  by  the  hair  the 
face  of  some  petty  traitor,  the  Smith  and  Brown  of 
some  provincial  Italian  town,  lets  the  fire  of  his  In- 
ferno glare  upon  it  for  a  moment,  and  it  is  printed 
forever  on  the  memory  of  mankind.  The  histo- 
rians may  iron  out  the  shoulders  of  Richard  III. 
as  smooth  as  they  can ;  they  will  never  get  over 
the  wrench  that  Shakspeare  gave  them. 

The  peculiarity  of  almost  all  early  literature  is 
that  it  seems  to  have  a  double  meaning;  that  un- 
derneath its  natural  we  find  ourselves  continually 
seeing  and  suspecting  a  supernatural  meaning. 
Even  in  the  older  epics  the  characters  seem  to  be 
only  half -historical  and  half-typical.  They  appear 
as  the  Pilgrim  Fathers  do  in  Twenty-second  of  De- 
cember speeches  at  Plymouth.  The  names  may  be 
historical,  but  the  attributes  are  ideal.  The  orator 
draws  a  portrait  rather  of  what  he  thinks  the 
founders  ought  to  have  been  than  a  likeness  which 
contemporaries  would  have  recognized.  Thus  did 
early  poets  endeavor  to  make  reality  out  of  ap- 
pearances. For,  except  a  few  typical  men  in  whom 
certain  ideas  get  embodied,  the  generations  of  man- 
kind are  mere  apparitions  who  come  out  of  the 

M*  201 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH   POETRY 

dark  for  a  purposeless  moment,  and  enter  the 
dai'k  again  after  they  have  performed  the  nothing 
they  came  for. 

The  poet's  gift,  then,  is  that  of  seer.  He  it  is 
that  discovers  the  trutli  as  it  exists  in  types  and 
images ;  that  is  the  spiritual  meaning,  which  abides 
forever  under  the  sensual.  And  his  instinct  is  to 
express  himself  also  in  types  and  images.  But  it 
was  not  only  necessary  that  he  himself  should  be 
delighted  with  his  vision,  but  that  he  should  inter- 
est his  hearers  with  the  faculty  divine.  Pm-e  truth 
is  not  acceptable  to  the  mental  palate.  It  must  be 
diluted  with  character  and  incident ;  it  must  be  hu- 
manized in  order  to  be  attractive.  If  the  bones  of 
a  mastodon  be  exhumed,  a  crowd  will  gather  out  of 
curiosity ;  but  let  the  skeleton  of  a  man  be  turned 
up,  and  what  a  difference  in  the  expression  of  the 
features !  Every  bystander  then  creates  his  little 
drama,  in  which  those  whitened  bones  take  flesh 
upon  them  and  stalk  as  chief  actor. 

The  poet  is  he  who  can  best  see  or  best  say  what 
is  ideal;  what  belongs  to  the  world  of  soul  and  of 
beauty.  Whether  he  celebrates  the  brave  and  good, 
or  the  gods,  or  the  beautiful  as  it  appears  in  man 
or  nature,  something  of  a  religious  character  still 
clings  to  him.  He  may  be  unconscious  of  his  mis- 
sion ;  he  may  be  false  to  it,  but  in  proportion  as  he 

202 


THE    FUNCTION  OF   THE   POET 

is  a  great  poet,  he  rises  to  the  level  of  it  more  of- 
ten. He  does  not  always  directly  rebuke  what  is 
bad  or  base,  but  indirectly,  by  making  us  feel  what 
delight  there  is  in  the  good  and  fair.  If  he  besiege 
evil  it  is  with  such  l)eautiful  engines  of  war  (as  Plu- 
tarch tells  us  of  Demetrius)  that  the  besieged  them- 
selves are  charmed  with  them.  Whoever  reads  the 
great  poets  cannot  but  be  made  better  by  it,  for 
they  always  introduce  him  to  a  higher  society,  to  a 
greater  style  of  manners  and  of  thinking.  Whoever 
learns  to  love  what  is  beautiful  is  made  incapable 
of  the  mean  and  low  and  bad.  It  is  something  to 
be  thought  of,  that  all  the  great  poets  have  been 
good  men.  He  who  translates  the  divine  into  the 
vulgar,  the  spiritual  into  the  sensual,  is  the  reverse 
of  a  poet. 

It  seems  to  be  thought  that  we  have  come  upon 
the  earth  too  late;  that  there  has  been  a  feast  of  the 
imagination  formerly,  and  all  that  is  left  for  us  is 
to  steal  the  scraps.  We  hear  that  there  is  no  poetry 
in  railroads,  steamboats,  and  telegraphs,  and  espe- 
cially in  Brother  Jonathan.  If  this  be  true,  so  much 
the  worse  for  him.  But,  because  he  is  a  materialist, 
shall  there  be  no  poets  !  When  we  have  said  that 
we  live  in  a  materialistic  age,  we  have  said  some- 
thing which  meant  more  than  we  intended.  If  we 
say  it  in  the  way  of  blame,  we  have  said  a  foolish 

203 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH  POETRY 

thing,  for  probably  one  age  is  as  good  as  another ; 
and,  at  any  rate,  the  worst  is  good  enough  com- 
pany for  us.  The  age  of  Shakspeare  seems  richer 
than  our  own  only  because  he  was  lucky  enough  to 
have  such  a  pair  of  eyes  as  his  to  see  it  and  such  a 
gift  as  his  to  report  it.  Shakspeare  did  not  sit 
down  and  cry  for  the  water  of  Helicon  to  turn  the 
wheels  of  his  little  private  mill  there  at  the  Bank- 
side.  He  appears  to  have  gone  more  quietly  about 
his  business  than  any  playwright  in  London ;  to 
have  drawn  off  what  water-pov\^er  he  wanted  from 
the  gi-eat  prosy  current  of  affairs  that  flows  alike 
for  all,  and  in  spite  of  all ;  to  have  ground  for  the 
public  what  grist  they  want,  coarse  or  fine ;  and  it 
seems  a  mere  piece  of  luck  that  the  smooth  stream 
of  his  activity  reflected  with  ravishing  clearness 
every  changing  mood  of  heaven  and  earth,  every 
stick  and  stone,  every  dog  and  clown  and  courtier 
that  stood  upon  its  brink.  It  is  a  curious  illustra- 
tion of  the  friendly  manner  in  which  Shakspeare 
received  everything  that  came  along,  of  what  a 
present  man  he  was,  that  in  the  very  same  year 
that  the  mulberry  tree  was  brought  into  England, 
he  got  one  and  planted  it  in  his  garden  at  Stratford. 
It  is  perfectly  true  that  this  is  a  materialistic  age, 
and  for  this  very  reason  we  want  our  poets  all  the 
more.     We  find  that  every  generation  contrives  to 

204 


THE    FUNCTION   OF   THE   POET 

catch  its  singing  larks  without  the  sky's  falling. 
When  the  poet  comes  he  always  turns  out  to  be  the 
man  who  discovers  that  the  passing  moment  is  the 
inspired  one,  and  that  the  secret  of  poetry  is  not  to 
have  lived  in  Homer's  day  or  Dante's,  but  to  be 
alive  now.  To  be  alive  now,  that  is  the  great  art 
and  mystery.  They  are  dead  men  who  live  in  the 
past,  and  men  yet  unborn  who  live  in  the  future. 
We  are  like  Hans-in-Luck,  forever  exchanging  the 
burthensome  good  we  have  for  something  else,  till 
at  last  we  come  home  empty-handed.  The  people 
who  find  their  own  age  prosaic  are  those  who  see 
only  its  costume.  And  this  is  what  makes  it  pro- 
saic :  that  we  have  not  faith  enough  in  ourselves  to 
think  that  our  own  clothes  are  good  enough  to  be 
presented  to  Posterity  in.  The  artists  seem  to 
think  that  the  court  dress  of  posterity  is  that  of 
Vandyke's  time  or  Caesar's.  I  have  seen  the  model 
of  a  statue  of  Sir  Robert  Peel  —  a  statesman  whose 
merit  consisted  in  yielding  gracefully  to  the  pres- 
ent—  in  which  the  sculptor  had  done  his  best  to 
travesty  the  real  man  into  a  make-believe  Roman. 
At  the  period  when  England  produced  its  greatest 
poets,  we  find  exactly  the  reverse  of  this,  and  we 
are  thankful  to  the  man  who  made  the  monument 
of  Lord  Bacon  that  he  had  genius  enough  to  copy 
every  button  of  his  dress,  everything  down  to  the 

205 


LECTURES   ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

rosettes  on  his  shoes.  These  men  had  faith  even  in 
their  own  shoe-strings.  Till  Dante's  time  the  Ital- 
ian poets  thought  no  language  good  enough  to  put 
their  nothings  into  but  Latin  (and,  indeed,  a  dead 
tongue  was  the  best  for  dead  thoughts),  but  Dante 
found  the  common  speech  of  Florence,  in  which 
men  bargained,  and  scolded,  and  made  love,  good 
enough  for  him,  and  out  of  the  world  around  him 
made  such  a  poem  as  no  Eoman  ever  sang. 

We  cannot  get  rid  of  our  wonder,  we  who  have 
brought  down  the  wild  lightning  from  writing  fiery 
doom  upon  the  walls  of  heaven  to  be  our  errand- 
boy  and  penny  postman.  In  this  day  of  news- 
papers and  electric  telegraphs,  in  wdiich  common- 
sense  and  ridicule  can  magnetise  a  whole  continent 
between  dinner  and  tea,  we  may  say  that  such  a 
phenomenon  as  Mahomet  were  impossible ;  and  be- 
hold Joe  Smith  and  the  State  of  Deseret !  Turning 
over  the  yellow  leaves  of  the  same  copy  of  Webster 
on  "Witchcraft"  which  Cotton  Mather  studied,  I 
thought.  Well,  that  goblin  is  laid  at  last!  And 
while  I  mused,  the  tables  were  dancing  and  the 
chairs  beating  the  devil's  tattoo  all  over  Christen- 
dom. I  have  a  neighbor  who  dug  down  through 
tough  strata  of  clay-slate  to  a  spring  pointed  out  by 
a  witch-hazel  rod  in  the  hands  of  a  seventh  son's 
seventh  son,  and  the  water  is  sweeter  to  him  for 

206 


THE   FUNCTION  OF  THE  POET 

the  wonder  that  is  mixed  with  it.  After  all,  it 
seems  that  oiu"  scientific  gas,  be  it  never  so  bril- 
liant, is  not  equal  to  the  dingy  old  Aladdin's  lamp. 

It  is  impossible  for  men  to  live  in  the  world  with- 
out poetry  of  some  sort  or  another.  If  they  cannot 
get  the  best,  they  will  get  at  some  substitute  for  it. 
But  there  is  as  much  poetry  as  ever  in  the  world  if 
we  can  ever  know  how  to  find  it  out ;  and  as  much 
imagination,  perhaps,  only  that  it  takes  a  more  pro- 
saic direction.  Every  man  who  meets  with  misfor- 
tune, who  is  stripped  of  his  material  prosperity, 
finds  that  he  has  a  little  outlying  mountain-farm  of 
imagination,  which  does  not  appear  in  the  schedule 
of  his  effects,  on  which  his  spirit  is  able  to  keep 
alive,  though  he  never  thought  of  it  while  he  was 
fortunate.  Job  turns  out  to  be  a  great  poet  as  soon 
as  his  flocks  and  herds  are  taken  away  from  him. 

Perhaps  our  continent  will  begin  to  sing  by  and 
by,  as  the  others  have  done.  We  have  had  the 
Practical  forced  upon  us  by  our  condition.  We 
have  had  a  whole  hemisphere  to  clear  up  and  put 
to  rights.  And  we  are  descended  from  men  who 
were  hardened  and  stiffened  by  a  downright  wrestle 
with  Necessity.  There  was  no  chance  for  poetry 
among  the  Puritans.  And  yet  if  any  people  have  a 
right  to  imagination,  it  should  be  the  descendants 
of  those  very  Puritans.     They  had  enough  of  it,  or 

207 


LECTURES  ON   ENGLISH   POETRY 

they  could  not  have  conceived  the  great  epic  they 
did,  whose  books  are  States,  and  which  is  written 
on  this  continent  from  Maine  to  California. 

John  Quincy  Adams,  making  a  speech  at  New 
Bedford  many  years  ago,  reckoned  the  number  of 
whale  ships  (if  I  remember  rightly)  that  sailed  out 
of  that  port,  and,  comparing  it  with  some  former 
period,  took  it  as  a  type  of  American  success.  But, 
alas  !  it  is  with  quite  other  oil  that  those  far-shining 
lamps  of  a  nation's  true  glory  which  burn  forever 
must  be  filled.  It  is  not  by  any  amount  of  material 
splendor  or  prosperity,  but  only  by  moral  greatness, 
by  ideas,  by  works  of  the  imagination,  that  a  race 
can  conquer  the  future.  No  voice  comes  to  us  from 
the  once  mighty  Assyria  but  the  hoot  of  the  owl 
that  nests  amid  her  crumbling  palaces ;  of  Carthage, 
whose  merchant  fleets  once  furled  their  sails  in 
every  port  of  the  known  world,  nothing  is  left  but 
the  deeds  of  Hannibal.  She  lies  dead  on  the  shore 
of  her  once  subject  sea,  and  the  wind  of  the  desert 
flings  its  handfuls  of  burial-sand  upon  her  corpse. 
A  fog  can  blot  Holland  or  Switzerland  out  of  exist- 
ence. But  how  large  is  the  space  occupied  in  the 
maps  of  the  soul  by  little  Athens  or  powerless  Italy. 
They  were  great  by  the  soul,  and  their  vital  force  is 
as  indestructible  as  the  soul. 

Till  America  has  learned  to  love  Art,  not  as  an 

208 


-    THE   FUNCTION  OF   THE  POET 

amusement,  not  as  a  mere  ornament  of  her  cities,  not 
as  a  superstition  of  what  is  comme  llfaut  for  a  great 
nation,  but  for  its  harmonizing  and  enno))liug  en- 
ergy, for  its  power  of  making  men  better  by  arousing 
in  them  the  perception  of  their  own  instincts  for  what 
is  beautiful  and  sacred  and  religious,  and  an  eternal 
rebuke  of  the  base  and  worldly,  she  will  not  have 
succeeded  in  that  high  sense  which  alone  makes  a 
nation  out  of  a  people,  and  raises  it  from  a  dead  name 
to  a  living  power.  Were  our  little  mother-island 
sunk  beneath  the  sea ;  or  worse,  were  she  conquered 
by  Scythian  barbarians,  yet  Shakspeare  would  be 
an  immortal  England,  and  would  conquer  countries 
when  the  bones  of  her  last  sailor  had  kept  their 
ghastly  watch  for  ages  in  unhallowed  ooze  beside 
the  quenched  thunders  of  her  navy. 

This  lesson  I  learn  from  the  past:  that  grace  and 
goodness,  the  fair,  the  noble,  and  the  true  will  never 
cease  out  of  the  world  till  the  God  from  whom  they 
emanate  ceases  out  of  it ;  that  the  sacred  duty  and 
noble  office  of  the  poet  is  to  reveal  and  justify  them 
to  man ;  that  as  long  as  the  soul  endures,  endures 
also  the  theme  of  new  and  unexampled  song ;  that 
while  there  is  grace  in  grace,  love  in  love,  and 
beauty  in  beauty,  God  will  still  send  poets  to  find 
them,  and  bear  witness  of  them,  and  to  hang  their 
ideal  portraitures  in  the  gallery  of  memory.     God 

209 


LECTURES   ON  ENGLISH  POETRY 

with  H.^  is  forever  the  mystical  theme  of  the  hour 
that  is  passing.  The  lives  of  the  great  poets  teach 
us  that  they  were  men  of  their  generation  who  felt 
most  deeply  the  meaning  of  the  Present. 

I  have  been  more  painfully  conscious  thau  any 
one  else  could  be  of  the  inadequacy  of  what  I  have 
been  able  to  say,  when  compared  to  the  richness 
and  variety  of  my  theme.  I  shall  endeavor  to 
make  my  apology  in  verse,  and  will  bid  you  fare- 
well in  a  little  poem  in  which  I  have  endeavored  to 
express  the  futility  of  all  effort  to  speak  the  loveli- 
ness of  things,  and  also  my  theory  of  where  the 
Muse  is  to  be  found,  if  ever.  It  is  to  her  that  I 
sing  my  hymn. 

Mr.  Lowell  here  read  an  original  poem  of  con- 
siderable length,  which  concluded  the  lecture,  and 
was  received  with  bursts  of  applause. 


210 


<• 


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IVIAYi:      ^ 

Ml  5     1952 
DEC  S  0  f§^t 

APR  2  2  v^S^ 
. JUN  1  5  19^0 

iNTEr.LIBRAEY  LOANS 

FEB  1  3  1963 
INTERLIBRARY  tlOA^S 
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